


Kate's Way

by burglebezzlement



Category: Hive Mind Series - Janet Edwards
Genre: Gen, Hive informational control, In-Universe Amateur Fiction, In-Universe Media Creation, Telepathic development, Telepathy Backstory, Telepathy and Telepaths, Treat, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-22
Updated: 2019-03-22
Packaged: 2019-11-19 08:52:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 23,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18133601
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/burglebezzlement/pseuds/burglebezzlement
Summary: 18-year-old Kate spent her time on Teen Level reading amateur bookettes, relishing the stories of impossible romance and adventure. But even the imaginative fantasies in amateur bookettes can’t prepare Kate for her Lottery result as a borderline telepath — or her new role working far away, at the Hive’s sea farm.Away from the main Hive, Kate will face new challenges — and find herself growing in ways she never expected.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [raininshadows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/raininshadows/gifts).



> Happy Worldbuildingex, raininshadows! I loved your prompts. :D
> 
> A note for other readers: This story does spoil some of the reveals in the Hive Mind series, but I think I’ve managed to avoid revealing the bigger twists. In terms of the most recent book, Hurricane, I do spoil one big reveal (what Juniper decides to do after the events of the book), but avoid spoiling the three other big reveals. 
> 
> I’ve included some basic worldbuilding info for the world, since I’m trying to make this feel like it could be a novella in the series, and the author does that in each of her works. If anyone tries reading this without having read any of the Hive Mind books first, I’d be interested to know if it works!

I know starting a story with the main character’s Lottery is a cliche. If you read amateur bookettes at all, you’ve probably seen it a million times. It’s even one of the Green Zone Amateur Press Association’s Cliches We Have Seen Too Often. 

But this story is true, and this is where it starts: with me sitting in a tiny room, five days into Lottery, waiting to be told my result.

The woman sitting across the table from me wore a bright red top that wouldn’t have looked out of place on Teen Level, and her black hair was curly and wild. 

“Don’t worry,” she said.

I tried to smile, but it probably came out like a grimace. It was easy for her to tell me not to worry, sitting comfortably on the other side of Lottery, the annual event that assessed every 18 year old in our Hive, before assigning them to their lifelong occupation and imprinting them with all of the information they would need to perform it.

“My name is Buzz,” the woman said. “Kate — do you go by Kate?”

I nodded, not trusting my voice.

“Don’t worry,” she said again, smiling. “There’s just one more test to go. Can you get your things and meet me in the main community room?”

I had already spent five days getting tested on everything from my reflexes to my running speed to my opinions on current Hive entertainment programmes. I had traveled from my home zone, Green Zone, all the way to Violet Zone for the testing, and then been sent back to Red Zone when the first community center didn’t have all the equipment for the tests I was being assigned. 

“One more test?” I asked.

“I promise.”

One more test, and this would all be over. I nodded and left the room, wondering what would come next.

Back in the temporary room I’d been assigned, I shoved all my belongings into my bag. I had a few day’s clothes, a good-luck bracelet my sister Elodie had made me when I first moved to Teen Level, and my favorite amateur bookette — one my best friend Marya had written the year before, about a girl our age who accidentally wandered out of the Hive and ended up Outside. 

In the bookette, Marya’s heroine met the Hunter of Souls, and disguised herself as a member of his horrible Pack to stay alive. She spent weeks living that way, while the Hunter of Souls grew to know her — and fall in love with her. The book ended with the heroine returning to the Hive, leaving the Hunter of Souls behind — but I knew Marya had plans for the sequel, in which the Hunter of Souls would finally be tamed, and return to the Hive with the heroine. It was all very romantic.

I hoped Marya could continue it, after Lottery. We knew adults who wrote amateur bookettes as a hobby, but what if Marya came out of Lottery with a new job, and was no longer interested in writing about the Hunter of Souls? I wanted to find out what would happen….

Buzz smiled encouragingly at me when I met her in the main community room. “I remember my Lottery,” she said, chattily. “I thought I was going to be a teacher like my parents, but Lottery had a very different plan for me.”

“Testing people in Lottery?” I asked, wondering. “Or is this not your regular job?”

“I do a lot of things,” Buzz said, as we got on the belt system heading south. She jumped over from the slow to the medium to the express belt, and I followed. “Ooooh, I like that girl’s top.” She nodded at a teen girl wearing a wild top, printed with Red Zone-sports team logos. 

Buzz kept chattering, pointing things out on the belt and in the windows of the shopping areas we passed. I tried to pay attention, but I found my mind wandering. Buzz seemed nice enough. I’d always had a sort of sense about whether someone was okay to trust or not, and it told me Buzz was okay. But I was still terrified of my Lottery result — and imprinting.

As I followed Buzz, I thought about Marya’s heroine. She had wandered out of the Hive by accident, in the middle of a great blackout like the one in Blue Zone a couple years ago. But sometimes people had to leave the Hive on purpose.

There were personnel trades. I couldn’t imagine that I had any hidden skills another Hive would want me for, but maybe there was something. Maybe Buzz hadn’t imprinted me because my new Hive wanted to imprint me instead.

Or maybe they were going to kick me out of the Hive entirely. I’d never written an amateur bookette myself, but I had helped Marya with hers. I knew the Hive didn’t actually approve of amateur bookettes, which was why we had to pass them back and forth in hard-copy. I thought of the forbidden copy of Marya’s bookette in my bag, and a few other equally forbidden bookettes I’d kept hidden at the bottom of my trunk, back in Green Zone, and flushed.

By the time we arrived in Yellow Zone and joined a west-bound express belt, I was panicking, barely paying attention to Buzz’s chatter.

What if this was an elaborate ruse to decoy me out of the Hive? I knew Marya had done her research, but I had trouble believing that I could survive Outside.

“Now we just have to go up,” Buzz said cheerfully, hitting the button to summon a lift.

She hit the button for Industry 1.

I didn’t usually ride in lifts. I had grown up on Level 52, only two levels down from Teen Level, so I rode the upways and downways when visiting my family. The Green Zone Amateur Bookette Association met on Level 73, though, and Marya and I had ridden the lifts a few times to go there. This lift seemed larger than I remembered those lifts being.

I expected inscrutable industrial equipment when we got off the lift, like I remembered from the field trip we took back when I was in school. Instead, it looked like a normal corridor block, with brightly-colored murals on the wall depicting people and flowers and animals. 

Buzz led me down a corridor and then into a room with chairs and a large table. She motioned for me to sit down, and left. 

I took deep breaths, the way the counselor I had seen while adjusting to Teen Level had suggested. Normally deep breaths could calm me down, but not today.

There was a painting on the wall, showing birds in a park. I focused on the birds. Did the birds live near here? I hadn’t known anyone lived on Industry 1.

Industry 1. Right below Outside. I tried to focus on the birds, but I found my mind returning to my fears.

A few minutes later, Buzz returned. There was a girl behind her, not much older than me. She was slight, with messy hair, but she must have been important, because she had two large men behind her, looking menacing. 

Buzz ignored the men. “Kate, this is Amber.”

Amber sat down in the chair across from me and closed her eyes. Moments later, her eyes few open.

She gasped. “She thinks you’re going to kick her out of the Hive! Buzz, you have to tell her what’s going on, right now.”


	2. Chapter 2

Buzz looked at Amber. “Does she —”

“Yes, she’s a loyal member of the Hive,” Amber said impatiently. She turned to me. “It’s going to be fine, Kate. You’re —”

A warbling alarm sounded, and I started. Was someone watching? How had Amber known what I was thinking? Was someone trying to stop Amber from telling me the truth?

A computerized voice said something about a Unit Emergency Alert. Amber gave me a sympathetic look, and then ran out of the room, followed by her two bodyguards.

“Emergency Alert,” I said, putting things together. And Amber had known what I was thinking. Or was Amber the one who had known?

“Are there nosies here?” I asked Buzz. “Is my Lottery result working with nosies? Is that why I had to come here first?”

I wasn’t scared of nosies, the way many people in the Hive were. Nosies were inhuman, violet-eyed creatures who patrolled the Hive, picking up on the thoughts of people who might commit crimes against the loyal Hive citizens. I knew most people disliked the thought of nosies rummaging around in their minds, but I found it comforting — as long as I convinced myself that the nosies wouldn’t care about my amateur bookette reading. So far, they hadn’t.

Buzz looked like she was trying not to laugh. 

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” she said. “I should probably start by telling you that nosies aren’t real.”

“What?” I didn’t understand.

“It’s a bluff,” Buzz said. “Telepaths are real, but we have very few of them. Most of the nosies are ordinary Hasties, dressed up in a costume. Once in a while, they’re played by a borderline telepath.” She paused. “Like us.”

My mouth fell open. Of all the things I’d thought Lottery might surprise me with, this had never been on the list. “Are you saying I’m a nosy?” 

I couldn’t be a nosy. I didn’t have the violet eyes, the strangely-shaped head. Although I hadn’t known who my father was. “Was my father one of the real nosies? Is that why I’m like this?”

“Nothing like that,” Buzz said. “Nosies, even the ones played by borderline telepaths, are just ordinary Hive citizens, playing a part. As long as the ordinary members of the Hive think nosies are real, they stay in line. We do have true telepaths, who can look into anyone’s mind at will. But most telepaths are borderline telepaths.” She paused for a moment. “I’m trying to think how to explain this.”

“If you’re a borderline telepath yourself, you must know,” I said. I had been so worried before, but now I was just confused.

“I know, but Lucas —” Buzz snapped her mouth shut and thought for a moment before continuing. “Amber, who you just met, is a true telepath. She can read anyone’s mind, any time she likes. But others, like you and I, have a lesser version of that gift. Like how some people are gifted swimmers, and can swim very fast — but other people can still swim, just not as well. Only imagine that there’s only five gifted swimmers in the entire Hive, and under a thousand of us less gifted swimmers found every Lottery.”

I found my mind going back to where it had been all week. “What does that mean for my Lottery result?”

Buzz seemed to relax, like she’d just gotten past a tricky bit, although I couldn’t imagine what it might have been. I could barely wrap my head around this entire telepath thing as it was. Maybe once I’d been imprinted, it would all make sense.

“Most borderline telepaths work in counseling and other roles where our insights give us special advantages.”

“So I’ll be a counselor?” I thought for a moment. It didn’t sound that bad. I’d always enjoyed talking to people.

“We have a special role for you,” Buzz said. “If you’re willing to accept it.”

Willing to? In a day of strange things, that was perhaps the strangest. Nobody chose whether or not to accept their Lottery result. “What do you mean?”

“We need a borderline telepath at the sea farm,” Buzz said. “And you are our first choice, if you are willing to go.”


	3. Chapter 3

“If I’m willing to go!” I stared at Buzz in shock. 

“Tactical Commander Lucas feels that this position should be something the new borderline telepath chooses,” Buzz said. “It’s the first time we’ve sent a borderline telepath to the sea farm, so you’d be assuming an entirely new role. You also wouldn’t be imprinted — at least, not at first.”

I wondered at that. I’d always been scared of my Lottery result, but reassured by the idea that the Hive would give me an imprint that would make sure I knew how to do my assigned job. Surely some parts of existing imprints would be useful to me.

I felt overwhelmed. “What happens if I decide not to accept the role?”

“Then you would be imprinted for another role requiring a borderline telepath,” Buzz said. “Borderline telepaths aren’t quite as well suited to our work as most members of the Hive, because there’s so few of us. But most of us find happiness in our jobs.”

Buzz leaned forward. “If you like, we can remove your memory of this conversation, so you don’t wonder what might have happened if you had made the other choice.” 

I didn’t know what I wanted to choose, but I did know I didn’t want that. “Can I think about it?”

“I understand.” Buzz patted my hand and gave me a smile. “Do you want to tour the unit?”

* * *

Amber’s unit was much larger than I’d realized from the corridor by the lifts. There was even a park, with a team of handsome men, most of them with dark hair, running laps around a lake. In the operational corridors, people looked at me — they must have all known one another, and I stood out, a scruffy, unfamiliar teen, teetering at the edge of Lottery without a proper Lottery result.

Buzz and I ended the tour in her apartment, and she waved me to the kitchen unit. “If you decide to take the job, you’ll get temporary accommodations here in Amber’s unit during your training period.”

I looked through the food options. My lunch at Lottery suddenly seemed like it had been a long time ago. “What’s a training period?”

“It’s rather like the activity sessions on Teen Level,” Buzz said. “We wouldn’t throw you out to the sea farm without preparation. There are always aspects of being a borderline telepath that can’t be imprinted. Amber’s unit handles situations requiring telepaths at the sea farm, so all of us have been there, and can help you learn what to expect.”

That made me feel better. I sunk into Buzz’s couch with a strawberry crunch cake.

A few minutes later, another unit alert sounded, and Buzz excused herself to go check in on Amber. I finished the strawberry crunch cake and stared at the flowers displayed on Buzz’s wall.

I had expected almost anything out of Lottery. Unlike some of my friends, I hadn’t shown any particular talents in my time on Teen Level. I loved reading amateur bookettes, but I hadn’t shown any talent in writing them, as my friend Marya had. My younger sister, Elodie, was a talented runner and was hoping to make the Green Zone sprinting squad. My other friends had gotten gold cards that entitled them to attend special sessions in various topics — but somehow, none of the things they loved had stuck with me.

I was deep in thought when my dataview chimed, and I hit answer without thinking.

“Kate!” Marya’s eager face filled the screen. “Where are you? I checked your Lottery result, but it said pending. That can’t be right, can it?”

I suddenly realized that I had no idea what I could tell Marya about my Lottery result.

“I don’t know yet,” I told her.

Marya looked shocked. “But it’s the fifth day! I thought everyone knew by the end of the fifth day.”

I shrugged. “Apparently not everyone.”

“A sixth day of Lottery!” Marya shivered. “Have they told you why?”

I felt bad, but reminded myself that I’d probably have to lie to her about my career again. Marya’s curiosity was legendary, and anything I told her might end up getting worked into an amateur bookette.

I decided on distraction. “I haven’t been able to look up your result yet,” I said.

She grinned. “Level Five Bookette Storyline Supervisor.”

“Really? High up!”

I was so happy for Marya, I forgot my own troubles. She loved writing amateur bookettes, and I knew she had longed for a wider audience for her stories.

“Isn’t it?” She held her dataview out and showed me a large apartment. “I meet my production team tomorrow.”

“Are they going to go for your entertainment programme about the nosy team?”

Marya had always been fascinated by nosies. She’d had a series of amateur bookettes about them once, just after we had moved to Teen Level. The bookettes focused on the team members working with the nosies — Marya hadn’t known enough about nosies to write about them as characters, and she hadn’t been a confident enough writer yet to just make things up. But I’d still loved those bookettes. They were shorter than Marya’s more recent work, and very romantic. Sometimes the nosy made vague proclamations about the members of the team, and you just knew that they were meant for one another. 

Marya wrinkled her nose. “My imprint has a lot of details about what I can say about nosies, and apparently that’s outside of the lines.”

“Really?” I remembered what Buzz had told me about the nosies being a giant bluff. Maybe there were good reasons for not focusing the rest of the Hive’s attention on what they were and what they did. “That’s too bad.”

“But there’s still plenty of other things to write about,” Marya said, perking up. “I think they’ll let me do updated Halloween stories! You remember the one about the girl who accidentally wandered out of the Hive?”

“You based my favorite of your bookettes on that,” I said eagerly. “Do you mean they’d let you adapt that for a real bookette? With acting and music and lights and everything?”

“Probably not directly,” Marya admitted. “I’d need a different love interest — the Hunter of Souls has very strict rules around how and when he can appear in official Hive publications. But I bet I can make something work.”

“I know you can,” I said. Marya was a genius at spinning fascinating stories. “I’m so happy for you!”

We chatted for a while longer, mostly about Marya’s new job, and then I signed off, explaining that I needed to tell my mother and my sister that I was still waiting.

“They’ll be worried,” Marya said, suddenly looking concerned. “Oh, Kate —”

“The Hive knows best,” I said, and Marya nodded as I ended the call.

I flopped back on Buzz’s couch. Easy to say the Hive knew best, but this was my decision, not the Hive’s.

I took the cowardly way out and sent my mother and sister quick text-only messages. I knew they would worry, but I didn’t have answers for them. Not yet.

It didn’t help that I knew my sister Elodie would have taken the chance to go to the sea farm as fast — as fast as she could sprint down a park path. Elodie was only a year younger than me, and we had always been close, but we were very different people. My mother still talked about how Elodie’s Freedom Day had ended when a hasty brought her home after dragging her out of an empty, muddy lake basin in a park closed for refurbishment three Zones away. Not like me, the dutiful Hive daughter, who spent Freedom Day feeding ducks in a neighboring area’s park, and whose only steps outside of the Hive’s approved activities had been amateur bookettes.

I found myself thinking of the first Green Zone Amateur Press Association meeting I’d ever attended with Marya.

Most amateur bookette writers copied out handwritten versions of their books for their friends to read. Paper was easy enough to come by, in specialty stores, and you could buy a ring punch and rings to keep the pages together. But if you wanted people other than your friends to read your work, it meant submitting a clean copy to your Zone’s Amateur Press Association and hoping for publication.

Press time, ink, and paper were all precious. A successful bookette could make money for the Association, but a flop would be costly, cutting into the members’ dues and even reducing the number of bookettes the Association could put out in the next round. So each quarter, the Association circulated hand-written copies of the new bookettes being considered for wider publication, and held a meeting where the members could vote on the bookettes. 

Teen Level dues had seemed frightfully high to us, even though membership dues were scaled by one’s home level. But Marya had a bookette that had been successful among the amateur bookette readers we knew on Teen Level, and both of us wanted to see the discussion as the Association considered it for publication.

During the meeting, an older woman named Bess had argued against publishing five romance bookettes in one quarter. 

“They’re barely different from the Hive’s official bookettes,” Bess had said, testily, in front of the assembled members crammed into the meeting room. “If it’s a Hive-approved bookette, the happy couple end up living on the level of the lower-rated member of the couple and being happy. If it’s an amateur bookette, some loophole or accident of Lottery is discovered, and the happy couple end up living on Level 1 and being happy. What’s the difference?”

Several members tried to argue, but Bess wasn’t finished. “Amateur bookettes are supposed to be something new,” she said. “Something the Hive doesn’t already give us. I know the romances sell widely, but must we? I feel we should publish smaller runs of more daring fiction. Inspire people to do better.”

In the end, the Association decided to run large print runs of several of the romances anyway, but also give small print runs to several of the more original books Bess had championed. 

Marya’s book was accepted too, for a medium print run. Marya was so happy she cried. Any print run at all was a major success for a Teen Level author.

“I’m fighting a losing battle,” Bess told me, later, after the meeting ended and the Association members crowded around the refreshments table. “When I was on Teen Level, amateur bookettes were original, not regurgitated Hive-approved pap.”

She must have seen me bristle. “Settle down,” she said. “I’m not talking about that Marya of yours. Hers is one of the few popular books I did like. She needs to work on her prose — our editors will help knock some of that awkwardness out of her. But at least her characters make decisions. The way some of these new writers are, the only decision their characters make is _Gosh, should I accept that Lottery made a mistake and I can go live on Level 1?_ ” Bess snorted.

At the time, I had thought that those romances were perfectly wonderful. And after all, the Hive didn’t need us to make decisions. The Hive knew best.

But now I was faced with a decision myself.

I thought of all of the amateur bookette heroines I had loved. Marya’s, and those from other authors, including some of the older authors Bess had recommended. I’d even read some very old bookettes, from authors who lived before the times of the Hives.

The Hive’s officially sanctioned bookettes hadn’t presented me with characters who had to make difficult choices. But I had chosen to read beyond what the Hive presented to me.

Maybe this was my chance to move beyond the Hive’s safe, encircling walls. Maybe this was my chance for an adventure. I knew I wouldn’t be meeting the Hunter of Souls, and surely the sea farm couldn’t be unsafe — but it would be new.

Buzz came back into the room then, looking more relaxed.

“Sorry I had to leave you,” she said. “I wasn’t monitoring the comms during Amber’s emergency run, so I had to make sure she didn’t need assistance when she returned.”

I had questions — so many questions. About what Amber’s role was. About the sea farm. About being a borderline telepath. And I knew there was one place to start.

“I want to do it,” I told Buzz. “I want to go to the sea farm. Please, tell me everything I need to know.”


	4. Chapter 4

The first thing I leaned about Amber’s unit was that I would never know what to expect.

The schedule in a Telepath Unit was always subject to change. The Tactics and Liaison teams scheduled check runs, when Amber would go out to a specific area of the Hive with her Strike Team to try to identify a member of the Hive whose behavior was escalating in ways that suggested they would become a danger to themselves or others.

But at any given time, Amber’s team could be given an emergency alert, like the one that had sounded when I had first visited the unit, sending Amber and her Strike Team out to respond to an active threat in the Hive. Emergency runs were hard for everyone. The Tactical and Liaison teams at least knew what was happening, as they decided the tactics to use and coordinated operations with other Hive authorities. The rest of us were left jittery and unfocused while we wondered what was going on.

Once Amber came back, there was a 24 hour recovery and rest period. Most of my training seemed to happen in these scattered days of recovery time, scheduled in at last minute. 

Adika, the head of Amber’s Strike Team, wouldn’t let me join on a strike or even a simple check run, but I got to sit in Tactics and Liaison for some of Amber’s runs, to see how everyone worked.

“You won’t have this kind of situation at the sea farm,” Buzz told me one day, after Amber and the Beta Team had returned from an emergency run in Orange Zone. 

I bit my lip. “Is being a borderline telepath the same?”

“Not for most of us,” Buzz said. We were sitting in the unit park, watching the Strike Team run laps. I had noticed that Buzz enjoyed watching the Strike Team, who were all darkly handsome.

“So if I don’t have a Strike Team, how will this work?”

“The sea farm is very small compared to the Hive,” Buzz said. “There’s only twenty thousand people or so. We’re sending you as Juniper’s liaison.”

“What’s that?”

Buzz smiled. “Juniper is the Deputy Sea Farm Admiral. She came out of Lottery recently.”

“Oh.” I thought about that. “What’s a liaison?”

“Tactics is hoping that nobody will be curious enough to ask,” Buzz said. “Incidents at the sea farm are handled by Sea Farm Security. We thought about assigning you to them, but the co-head of Sea Farm Security is very bad at keeping secrets, and we can’t risk telling him about your true talents.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “Who will know what I can do?”

“Juniper’s imprint covers the truth about nosies and true telepaths. We’re hoping that if we assign you a role as Juniper’s assistant, you can meet most of the suspects in their various cases and get enough of a telepathic impression to help us only send the guilty parties back to the Hive for treatment, instead of sending all the suspects and making them wait until Amber can read their minds.”

I nodded. I would have been terrified to be suddenly shipped off to a distant Zone without warning. I could imagine it would be even worse to be brought from the sea farm to the Hive. 

“You probably won’t be able to tell every time,” Buzz cautioned me. “Amber found that sea farm minds were more difficult for her to read.”

“Were you able to get insights from people at the sea farm?”

Buzz smiled. “I was. That was what gave Lucas this idea, in fact.”

Tactics worked up a set of strategies for me to use. I had to work through Juniper, and try to use my insights to provide her with ways to influence the investigation. 

Above all, though, I had to be cautious. The nosy secret had to be protected at all costs, so I couldn’t let anyone guess that I was a telepath. This wasn’t a issue for ordinary borderline telepaths, who often worked on Level 20 with Law Enforcement. But for me, all alone at the sea farm, it would be critical.

I spent some of my time reading Sea Farm Security records. Apart from the murder of the Head of Sea Farm Security years earlier, and the situation Amber’s team had solved just before New Year, things seemed relatively minor. Thefts. Destruction of something called a security camera.

Going Outside was my biggest fear during training. If I couldn’t handle being Outside, how could I handle going to the sea farm? I knew there were people from the Hive who had been assigned work at the sea farm, but most of them had roles working in the Haven, the mini-Hive complex where the administrative offices and apartment units were. My role working with Juniper would require me to leave the Haven.

If I could manage it.

Eli, one of the members of Amber’s Strike Team, was recovering from a surgery on his leg, so he got assigned to bring me Outside for the first time. 

“Thank you for bringing me,” I said. “I know you’re supposed to be recuperating.”

I tried reaching out with my mind, the way Amber had described to me a few days before, and thought I felt a hint of amusement. I couldn’t be sure.

“It’s good physical therapy,” he said, grinning, as he led me through Industry 1 to the door to Outside.

I felt nervous, but excited, like a child waiting for New Year. “What’s it like?”

“You’ll know yourself in a few moments,” Eli said, before relenting. “Really, though, it’s not that bad. It’s like a very big park.”

“Like a beach?” I asked. I’d grown up in Green Zone, not far from the enormous beaches that were always located near the center of the Hive. I’d never gotten up the courage for cliff climbing or surfing, like my sister Elodie, but Marya and I had spent free days paddling in the waves and relaxing under the artificial suns with amateur bookettes.

Eli looked amused. “Even bigger than a beach.”

Bigger than a Hive beach! I tried to imagine it, but I couldn’t.

“It terrifies most people at first,” Eli said. “Even some of us burly Strike Team members.”

I thought of Marya’s heroine, wandering outside accidentally during a blackout. Given how many warning signs there were on the way to Outside, stumbling outside by accident no longer seemed like the delicious threat it had been while reading. 

I kept my eyes carefully down as Eli led me through the final door. _This is it_ , I thought, my heart beating fast. If I couldn’t handle the sight of Outside —

The ground shifted, from the practical concrete of the industrial areas of the Hive to an uneven, untidy path. The grass along the path was unkempt, like an area of a park waiting for refurbishment, but it didn’t seem threatening.

Eli let me stop a few steps out of the door. I took a deep breath and raised my eyes.

“It’s just a park,” I said, indignantly, looking at the trees clustering closely around the door. 

Eli smiled. “Look up.” 

I did, and staggered back for a moment. “Waste that!”

Eli watched me carefully as I stared up into the sky again.

This park sky — it took a moment before I realized that it couldn’t be painted, given how perfectly blue it was. The pathway and grass might have needed refurbishment, but the sky certainly didn’t. Most park ceilings were pale blue, not this deep shade. 

From my lessons with the members of Amber’s unit, I knew that Outside had no ceiling, no protecting outer walls, but this — “Why can’t I see out the way I can see up?”

“This exit has tree plantings clustered around the door,” Eli explained. “We’ve found it helpful when unit members are learning to tolerate the Outside.” He shrugged. “You’re doing well. It took Buzz weeks to get this far, even with trees blocking the view.”

“I want to see out,” I said immediately. “Past the trees.” I stopped, suddenly guilty. “If your leg can do that. How is your leg?”

Eli laughed. “It’s fine. Atticus told me not to run on it yet, but he didn’t tell me not to walk!”

“Then let’s walk, please.”

“Watch your step,” Eli said, as he led me to a path into the trees. “This part of Outside is fairly well-managed, but it’s still uneven compared to walking paths in parks inside the Hive.”

He wasn’t wrong. I nearly tripped several times before I caught the trick of walking on the uneven ground.

We walked several cors into the trees before coming out into the clear. I stopped at the edge of the trees, uncertain, and looked out.

Outside was enormous. Marya had tried to explain in her bookette, but she hadn’t managed. How could she? She didn’t know herself.

I wasn’t terrified, as I had expected to be, but the sight made my brain feel like it was trying to rearrange itself from the inside. “How?” I asked, not sure what I meant. How was Outside this large? How had I not known?

“We’ve only walked a short distance across the top of the Hive,” Eli said. “Think of how many parks and housing warrens there are in the Hive, though. You’re just seeing all that space at once.”

“I suppose.” I looked down at the ground for a moment, to let my brain stop rearranging itself, and then looked up again. “Where’s the edge?”

“Far from here,” Eli said. “The Ramblers call it the tabletop — it’s a steep path down. That really would hurt my leg.”

I nodded, still looking out into the distance. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking of your leg. We should head back.”

“It’s fine,” Eli said. “We’re actually closer to another door now, if you’re comfortable walking through the open.”

I nodded decisively. “Lead on!”


	5. Chapter 5

Amber’s emergency runs could happen at any time of the day or night. When a run ended in the morning, members of the unit often ended up on the small beach in the park’s lake. There was a grassy field where the Strike team played games, and the park keeper had even set up a few reclining chairs. 

I didn’t always feel comfortable joining the other members of the unit. I was acutely aware that I’d be leaving soon, and that my presence meant people were taking up time they needed to run Amber’s unit to train me instead.

Today, though, I was already lying on the grass, relaxing under the park’s suns with one of Marya’s bookettes, when others from the unit arrived.

Hallie sat down near me. I hadn’t spoken to Hallie often — she was a junior member of the Tactical team. When I saw her, it was usually in the hallway, her short purple hair bouncing wildly as she jogged towards the Tactical offices for an emergency run.

She looked at my bookette. “You read amateur bookettes?”

I had been keeping my amateur bookette habit to my own apartment. I blushed. “I — yes. One of my friends from Teen Level wrote it.”

“High up!” Hallie looked impressed, not disgusted.

“I know they’re not sanctioned by the Hive,” I said.

“We have a whole shelf of them in Tactical,” Hallie said. She reached out and I handed her the book. “I don’t think I’ve seen your friend’s books before, though.”

Gideon, one of the oldest members of the Tactical Team, sat down on a chair nearby. “You wouldn’t have,” he said. “We tend to get the authors who are being observed for subversive tendencies, along with a few authors Tactical Commander Lucas enjoys.”

“I didn’t even know there were amateur bookettes with romances!” Hallie said, handing the bookette back to me. “I’ll ask the Admin team to include a few in our next order from the All-Hive Amateur Press Association.”

“You can do that?” I asked. The All-Hive printed a paper guide to the bookettes being printed by each Zone’s Amateur Press Associations. I’d flipped through it a few times, at our Green Zone meetings, but I’d never had the courage to order from it. Instead, I’d bought bookettes from the Green Zone club publications, and traded with others for rarer volumes from other Zones. 

Gideon smiled. “Amateur bookettes might not officially be sanctioned, but the Hive knows about them.”

“Really?” I asked.

“Of course,” Gideon said. “Think about how much press time gets devoted to amateur bookettes.”

I knew the Green Zone Amateur Press Association bought time on the big printing presses used by the Hive for official purposes. The presses were used to print things like emergency manuals, in case of power outages like the one in Blue Zone a few years earlier, and procedures for Hive outposts, where someone might be unable to use their dataview in an emergency. I had never thought about how many amateur bookettes were published versus the number of emergency manuals, though.

“The Hive turns a blind eye to most amateur bookettes,” Gideon explained, leaning back on his chair. “Like the Rambler’s Association, they serve an important purpose. Some people have a need for the kind of speculative stories that can’t be broadcast on the regular Hive entertainment programmes, or put into a regular bookette. Fostering those individuals’ imagination helps Lottery discover candidates for positions like Hive leadership roles, science and technology research, and creation of sanctioned Hive entertainment programmes.”

A voice spoke from behind us. “And sometimes they end up on Telepath Unit Tactical teams.”

I turned my head to see Tactical Commander Lucas behind me, with Amber a step behind him. His mouth crooked in a smile. “Shocked to find yourself among fellow deviants?”

I was. He could probably see as much on my face. 

Lucas waved a hand. “If anything truly subversive shows up, the printing press operators have an unfortunate rush order and are unable to help. I rather suspect most of the Amateur Press Associations have worked out the boundaries by now.”

I’d heard Bess complain about press overbooking before, but it hadn’t occurred to me that the Hive might be behind it. “I guess that makes sense,” I said.

“You’re welcome to browse the Tactical library,” Lucas said. “I wish I could stay and see if we’ve read any of the same authors, but the Joint Tactical Meeting calls.”

“I have to go meet Buzz myself,” I said hastily, knowing how important Tactical Commander Lucas’s time was.

* * *

My time in Amber’s unit was confusing, busy, tumultuous, and amazing. And when it ended, it ended as quickly as it had begun. 

The day before, Buzz had taken me to a training facility for borderline telepaths, filled with the people undergoing treatment and the people who had been determined to be truly irredeemable.

This was one of the first times Buzz had asked me to use my telepathy. I think I hadn’t even been sure I was telepathic. Sure, sometimes I thought I had insights into people — but I also knew I could be fooling myself. Mistaking my own thoughts for those of the others around me.

And then I shook the hand of a nice looking older woman wearing a striped one-suit.

In that moment, I knew I was a telepath. That none of it was a cruel joke. I might have imagined Eli’s joy in being able to run again after his surgery, or Buzz’s interest in the men on Amber’s Strike teams. But nothing in my life in the Hive had prepared me for the malice I felt with that one touch.

The feeling of corrosive spite had been hard to shake off.

“It hits all of us like that,” Buzz said sympathetically. We were on our way back to Amber’s unit.

I shivered. “How many of Amber’s targets are like that?”

“Only a very few,” Buzz said. “Almost everyone can be helped, whether through counseling, medication, or in extreme cases, resetting their personal experience chain to an earlier point.” She paused. “There have only been two irredeemable cases from the sea farm in the past ten years.”

Buzz’s words were reassuring, but I still found the feeling difficult to shake off. I tried to distract myself by reading in my sleep field, but found it difficult to concentrate on my bookette. I slept uncertainly that night, waking frequently from dreams that someone was talking just outside my room.

When I woke up that morning, I had a crushing headache. I’d had headaches before, but they’d generally gone away quickly. This one seemed to be getting worse. 

I took a shower and tried to clear my head, but the pain still throbbed. I threw on the first top and skirt I found in my wardrobe and went to the unit medical area.

Megan, the Senior Administrator, met me, an expression of concern on her face. “Kate! Is everything okay?”

I must have looked as bad as I felt. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just have this headache.”

Megan showed me into a treatment room and started a scan on the overhead scanning grid. “Stay still while this is running. This will only take a moment, and then we can get you some pain relief.” She looked down at her dataview. “When did the pain start?”

I told her about the trip with Buzz, the day before, and about my nightmares. Megan seemed curious about the nightmares, asking me about the voices I had been hearing in the shadows.

“It was just a bad dream,” I said anxiously. “I have them sometimes.”

Megan looked down at her dataview again, her expression serious.

“Give me a moment, Kate. I have to step away.”

She closed the door behind her. When the scanning grid beeped to indicate it had completed, I sat down on the hard bed. Why did Megan look so worried about a headache? Was something wrong with me?

I shut my eyes and tried not to worry. The Hive’s medical care was excellent, and I had just had full medical scans during Lottery. Surely nothing serious was wrong.

To distract myself from the pain in my head, I took some deep breaths. I could just hear Megan outside the room. She must have been speaking to someone on her dataview.

“...didn’t think there was any chance Lucas’s rabbit-brained idea would work,” she said, “or I never would have let....” Her voice faded out. 

Was this about me? I kept my eyes shut, struggling to hear.

“...if there’s any chance at all, Amber is in danger!”

I relaxed. Whatever this was, it wasn’t about me. Amber faced danger every day, but a borderline telepath like me wouldn’t be a threat to her. Megan must be handling another unit emergency that had come up while she was treating me. I just had to be patient and wait.

A moment or two later, I heard the emergency alert tone sound. Amber had another emergency run. I listened as people ran past the medical area, knowing they would be assembling in the Liaison and Tactical areas and in the hall by the lifts.

Megan came back in a few minutes later, looking less worried. “I’m sorry about that,” she said, and handed me a couple pills. “These should help the pain.”

I chewed them and swallowed, and then relaxed as I felt the medicine start to take effect. “Thank you. I’ve had headaches before, but none as bad as that one.”

“I’ve made a note in your medical record, so the staff at the sea farm will know what to do if you have another one there.” Megan paused for a moment. “This is actually good timing, because we needed to talk to you about the final step in your training.”

“Already?” I had never had a firm time table for my training, since Amber’s schedule and the schedule of everyone else in her unit was so unpredictable. But from things Buzz had said, I had thought the process would take longer.

“There’s an opening for your re-testing,” Megan said. 

“Re-testing!”

“Lucas wants to re-run some of the tests you did during Lottery, along with some new ones, so the Tactical team has a baseline of where your abilities are before you leave for the sea farm. We don’t know how living Outside will affect a borderline telepath, so he wants to get all the data he can.”

Megan didn’t look evasive, but I still had a nagging feeling that she wasn’t telling me the whole truth. I didn’t say anything, though.

“If you pack a bag with what you need for a few days, we can have Eli take you to the testing unit right now. We’ll have Hannah pack the rest of your things to send along to the sea farm, so they can be there when you arrive.”

“Why do I need Eli to take me?” I asked.

“You’ve got a headache,” Megan said firmly. “And you’ll need an escort to the aircraft hangar to go to the sea farm. It’s easier to keep Eli with you.”

I went back to my temporary apartment and packed a bag. With everyone dealing with an emergency run, I wouldn’t get to say goodbye in person, although I could message people. I would need to rely on messages a lot once I got to the sea farm. I supposed I would get used to that.

Eli was waiting for me by the lifts. “Ready for the next step?” he asked.

“Not even a little bit,” I said, “but here I go.”


	6. Chapter 6

Eli and I took the lift down to Level 20, the Health and Safety level, and then traveled through the Hive on the express belts to Turquoise Zone.

All of my lottery tests had been in community centers, so the small offices of the Hive Security Unit were a change. I spent the day re-running several tests I remembered from Lottery, including some with hypnotics. The people administering the tests brought me lunch halfway through the day. 

That night, I came out to find Eli still waiting.

“Eli! Why are you still here?”

“Megan asked me to make sure you found your way to your temporary accommodation safely,” he said cheerfully. “You don’t mind, do you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Only I’m staying with my mother in her apartment tonight, so I don’t need temporary accommodations.”

I was nervous about seeing my mother and sister. I hadn’t been able to visit since Lottery, and I knew I might not be able to see them for a while after I went to the sea farm. 

Buzz and the Tactical Team had walked me through all of the explanations to give. To everyone I knew from before Lottery, I was a sea farm liaison, sent to the sea farm to coordinate operations between the sea farm admiralty and the main Hive. Unfortunately, the strangeness of an assignment at the sea farm and not having a level was probably going to lead to more questions than I had answers for.

“I can take you there,” Eli said.

“You really don’t need to,” I said, feeling guilty. “It’s just over in Green Zone. I told the testing people that I’d be back tomorrow, and they said it would be fine.”

“Green Zone?” Eli nodded. “Can you tell me where in Green Zone?”

I gave him the address, mystified. He paused after I gave him the area, so I told him my mother’s level as well. After five years obeying all the Teen Zone rules about never revealing your home level, it felt strange to tell someone so openly. 

“Megan worries,” Eli said. “Please let us know if you go anywhere else over the next few days.”

“I might try to meet up with my friend Marya,” I said, and gave him Marya’s new apartment area, also in Green Zone. “I don’t think she’ll have time, though.” Based on Marya’s messages, she was thrilled by her new job and spending every possible minute with her team. She was also fascinated by the sea farm, so I knew we’d be meeting eventually — but it seemed that the sea farm wasn’t an approved topic for entertainment programmes at the Hive, which meant mining me for details about the experience was currently low on her priority list.

“That should be fine,” Eli said. “Just let us know if you go anywhere else over the next couple days. I’ll be back to escort you to the hangar on Industry 1 once the testing wraps up.”

After all of my worries about seeing my family, I fell asleep too quickly that night to answer any questions. The testing had tired me out, even though I couldn’t remember half of it.

The next two days brought new tests. I spent a full morning sitting in the dark, trying to hear people talking around me, before an afternoon of incomprehensible tests. The second day was filled with looking at photos of people on a screen and trying to answer impossible questions about them. How could I possibly know what a professional-looking woman in a onesuit felt about crunch cakes? I answered the questions as best I could and moved on.

My headache had come back as I headed back down the lifts to Level 52 and my mother’s apartment. I knew I’d be heading to the sea farm the next day — Eli had sent a message saying he would come meet me at my mother’s apartment the next morning. 

My sister Elodie came down from Teen Level to visit that evening. She showed up wearing a children’s tracking bracelet.

“Oh, Elodie.” My mother sighed. “What was it this time?”

“Nothing bad,” Elodie said. “We just wanted to see the baby chicks on Industry 5. The hasties didn’t catch us until we were in the emergency evac stairs.”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” my mother said. “You’ve got your Lottery result to think of.”

“That’s exactly why I have to do these things now.” Elodie grinned. “I can’t do them after Lottery, and can you imagine how boring it’ll be if I get assigned to a job in some office or shop somewhere?”

My mother gave her a look. “I don’t know much about how Lottery works,” she said, “but I do know a system set up for matching everyone to a well-suited career is highly unlikely to place you in a desk job, Elodie.”

“What I’d really love is something where I get to travel,” Elodie said. “Can you imagine getting imprinted for Hive Joint Treaty Enforcement?”

“Don’t even think about that,” my mother said. “My coworker’s neighbor’s cousin’s daughter was assigned to Hive Joint Treaty Enforcement in Lottery, and she never got to come back. They will never assign you to oversee anything here or even visit your birth Hive. I’m already losing Kate to the sea farm. I can’t lose you, too.”

I felt my eyes well up. “You’re not losing me,” I promised. “I’ll still be able to write and call. The team I’m working with said I might even be able to visit sometimes.”

My mother reached out to hug me. “I know, duckling. I’m just going to miss you, is all.”

Elodie had recently placed highly in a Green Zone sprinting event, and my mother went all out with all of our favorite foods to celebrate for both of us. I knew my mother was confused about my Lottery result, but she was happy to think I had been imprinted and would be a productive member of the Hive. 

“My girls,” my mother said, looking at us sentimentally over the casserole dish. “I’m so proud of you both.”

I wondered if she would be as proud if she knew the truth about what I would be doing at the sea farm. My mother had never been bothered much by nosies, but surely it would be different if the nosy was in your own family.

Elodie spent the meal chattering about the Run the Hive event she was planning with the Green Zone Teen Level track and field team. The Hive discouraged running outside of parks and exercise facilities, so people who wanted to run longer distances had to get creative. Elodie and her friends had measured the distance of the running loop in their local area park, and had figured out how many loops they would have to run to cover the distance across one Zone, two Zones, or even the full Hive.

“The rumor is that someone managed to run the entire Hive once,” Elodie said. “I ran an entire Zone last year, so I’m shooting for that again.”

“I got to run on top of the Hive,” I said without thinking.

“What?” Elodie leaned forward. “How? I didn’t know that was possible!”

I knew, from my mother’s expression, that I had made a mistake. “Only because the people training me needed to help me get comfortable Outside,” I said hurriedly. “I would never have gone out there if it wasn’t a requirement for my new job.”

“But… Outside!” Elodie looked excited. “And you could run there?”

“There are paths,” I said warily. “Eli, the one who was training me, has been recovering from a surgery, so we did some running up there as part of that.” I flushed. Elodie had made me run with her at our local park often enough that I wasn’t terrible, but I’d been much slower than Eli even though he was recovering.

“You could really Run the Hive,” Elodie said. “Is just anyone allowed up there?”

I glanced back at my mother. “It’s dangerous,” I said. “There’s something called seasons that means the conditions Outside could be terrible, with high heat or weather so cold that frozen ice falls from the sky. Truesun can even burn your skin if you stay out long enough.”

Elodie’s expression became calculating. I could tell that as soon as her tracking bracelet came off, she’d be talking her friends into going for a run Outside.

“I hate to think of you going through that seasons thing at the sea farm,” my mother said.

“Don’t worry. I’ll be safe in the Haven. It’s like a smaller Hive. And when I do go Outside, I’ll have protective clothing.”

We watched an entertainment programme before Elodie went back to Teen Level.

When Elodie had moved to Teen Level a few years earlier, my mother had moved back into single housing, but she kept an extra sleep field in the living room. “Just so you girls can always come home,” she had said, although we had both protested. Teen Level rules meant the two of us could only come home once a week, and couldn’t spend the night — and we knew we would be given our own apartments after Lottery. Except here we were, with me staying on the sleep field nobody could have predicted my mother would need.

I knew that I’d be able to request temporary accommodations if I traveled back to the Hive for work, but I was unsure about whether family visits were the same. Buzz had said that people from the sea farm sometimes traveled to the Hive to visit family members, but how often would my sea farm duties let me leave?

I let the warm air of the sleep field envelop me and tried to relax. I expected not to sleep at all, with excitement over what I might find at the sea farm. Instead, I drifted off to sleep immediately.


	7. Chapter 7

Eli met me bright and early the next morning. He declined my mother’s offer of breakfast — “Kate has to fly,” he’d explained, “and it makes some people queasy” — but he was nice about it, joking with her and assuring her that I would be coming back to the Hive eventually.

The belts weren’t crowded with commuters yet. I let Eli carry my bag and tried to ignore the tears prickling at the edges of my eyes. I liked reading about other people having adventures, but having to leave my family to go have one myself had me feeling rather sorry for myself.

The Tactical team had decided that I needed to take the scheduled flight to the sea farm, to avoid making me stand out when I arrived. The aircraft hangar was already busy with others when we showed up. Eli helped me put my bag in the cargo area, and then gave me a hug.

“You’ll do great,” he said. 

At the contact, I was overwhelmed with a sudden glimpse into Eli’s emotions. He wasn’t just saying that to be nice. He thought I was going to do great things at the sea farm. Juniper was his friend, and he was happy she was going to have someone like me to help her.

I blinked back tears again. “Thank you,” I said, trying to put emotion into my words for everything I couldn’t admit I had seen.

Then it was time to get on the aircraft. The pilot, a woman not much older than me, asked if I could handle having the aircraft window shades open.

“I think so,” I said nervously. “I’ve seen Outside before.”

“That’s good.” She smiled encouragingly. “Tell you what — I’ll put you next to Violet and her daughter. They can help you pull the shades down if you get nervous.”

The people boarding the aircraft were a mix of Hive Defense personnel and sea farm residents. I found I could tell them apart easily. The Hive Defense personnel carried themselves with the discipline of daily training. The sea farm residents wore clothing that might not have stood out at the main Hive, but that became noticeable as they stood together, with paler shades than the Hive favored, and more textured fabrics. 

The pilot introduced me to Violet, a woman a little younger than my mother, before going back to make final checks for departure. 

“First time at the sea farm?” Violet asked. She patted her daughter’s shoulder. The girl appeared to be around six or seven, and looked thrilled to be on the aircraft. “This was Rilla’s first time at the Hive.”

We chatted for a bit. Violet had been bringing Rilla to the Hive for medical checks, which had apparently gone well. Rilla was more interested in telling me about the new types of crunch cakes the Hive had. 

Before I knew it, it was time to go. I waved to Eli through the aircraft window, and then we were swooping towards the hangar door.

The ground suddenly dropped away beneath us. I gasped. 

Rilla patted my arm, reassuringly. “It’s very safe,” she said. 

“I’m fine,” I said, although it had been rather a shock. The aircraft quickly gained height. The trees below us turned from full-sized trees into park-sized trees, and then into tiny trees like the ones in a children’s area toy box. 

I had a swooping feeling in my stomach. Not a bad one, exactly — it was scary, but thrilling, too, like reading a spooky amateur bookette in the middle of the night and enjoying the creepy feelings. 

Eli had told me about weather Outside. Today seemed to be a sunny day. Soon enough, we could see the sea off in the distance, stretching out towards the horizon, impossibly big.

Rilla looked up at me. “What do you think?”

“It looks fake,” I said, honestly. I knew it wasn’t, but right now, it looked more like a pretty picture in a bookette. 

“It isn’t!” Rilla said indignantly.

“I know.” I bit my lip. “I’m sorry. I haven’t seen it before.”

“It takes some people like that,” Violet said easily. “I’m imprinted-status, working on counseling regular Hive members who are reassigned to the sea farm. Some of them come to us because of their claustrophobia, but then they get to the sea farm and find themselves battling their conditioned agoraphobia as well.”

I had never heard the word agoraphobia before, but I thought I could tell from how she had used it. “People who are scared of the Outside?”

“Exactly.” She smiled. “It’s been a busy few years, what with all the Blue Zonies adjusting.”

Amber’s team had told me about them. After the giant Blue Zone blackout, some of the people trapped in lifts had had a difficult time readjusting to the confined spaces of the Hive, and had moved to the sea farm. Unfortunately, some of them had had difficulties adapting to the Outside as well, leaving them trapped in the Haven, uncomfortable with both places.

“You’re doing well,” Violet said. “But if you have any difficulty, ask Juniper to get in touch with me and we can talk.”

“How did you know I’d be working with Juniper?” I asked.

“The sea farm is small,” Violet said. “And we don’t get many new people this long after Lottery. Which means you must be the new liaison.”

I admitted that I was. 

Rilla and Violet pointed out the different areas of the sea farm as we flew closer. The bumpy hills, known as High Fold, where animals were raised. The fields of Harvest, a bright green patchwork under the sun, and the glasshouses of Tropics, and beyond them all, the sparkling light of the sun reflecting off the sea. 

Soon we were flying back into another hangar, this one smaller. Those of us traveling to the sea farm collected our luggage from the cargo area and got off the aircraft. Most of the Hive Defense people stayed on board, but I noticed with interest that a few got off. Did Hive Defense people have meetings here, or were some of them from the sea farm?

I shouldered my bag and walked into the main part of the hangar. I thanked Violet and Rilla for their help and then looked around for Juniper. 

She was unmistakable, in her striped blazer, standing alone and watching the people getting off the aircraft. She was shorter than me, but standing tall, her long hair caught into a series of ties. Her left forearm was wrapped in an exoskeleton. The Tactical team had told me about that — how Juniper had been badly injured in one of the “accidents” they had gone to the sea farm to investigate, and had been instrumental in helping to find the true culprit.

“Kate!” Juniper grinned. “You’re just like Amber described.”


	8. Chapter 8

_Like Amber described?_ I wondered what Amber had said about me. I knew she and Juniper had become friends when her unit had gone to the sea farm, but it hadn’t occurred to me that they might talk about me.

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said, feeling awkward.

Juniper ignored my formality and shook my hand. I had an insight when she did. Juniper was glad to see me here, and excited to work with me — she and Admiral Tregereth, the current Sea Farm Admiral, had a list of things they’d been holding off on doing until their borderline telepath arrived. Now that I was finally here, she was excited to get things moving.

Juniper led me to the doors leading from the hangar into the rest of the Haven. “First things first. Are you comfortable in an outside apartment, or would an inside apartment be better?”

I paused. “Is an outside apartment a house?” The Tactical team had told me about houses, tiny shelters that were built Outside and held only one family unit. I had managed to deal with the Outside during my walks with Eli, but I wasn’t sure if I was prepared to live there.

“No, nothing like that.” Juniper brought me to a lift bank. “The Haven has inside and outside apartments. The outside apartments have windows, and the inside ones don’t. But the only inside apartments free right now are down on Level 3, far away from the central areas. Most of your work will be on Level 1, with our offices and Sea Farm Security. The nearest open apartment is on Level 2, but it’s an outside apartment.”

I thought about waking up each morning to the sight of the sea, right next to my sleep field. “Are there windows in all the rooms?”

“The one that’s available has a window in the living room and kitchen, but not the bedroom or bathroom.”

“That seems like it could work,” I said cautiously. “Could I move later if I decide I can’t handle it?”

“Of course,” Juniper said. “We’ve got plenty of room on Level 3. It’s Level 2 where things are crowded.”

I thought about Amber’s team, running to their work areas in the middle of the night for emergency alerts. I wasn’t sure if the sea farm would have emergency alerts, but just in case....

“Let’s start with Level 2.” I heard myself and laughed. “Level 2 must seem very different here.”

“I always thought it was strange how much people moving here from the Hive talked about levels,” Juniper said. 

I concentrated for a moment, and found I could reach back out to Juniper’s mind. It was easier, somehow, than it had been at the Hive. Yes, she really was confused by the Hive’s focus on levels. The sea farm had no levels, and Juniper had never seen much use for them.

The interior corridors of the Haven looked strange, to my eyes — protruding lighting fixtures, and long corridors without murals or parks to break them up. I supposed there was no purpose in a park here, with all of Outside right there. 

The apartment Juniper showed me to was spacious, with wide windows in the living room, looking out over the sea. After the stories about the Haven I had heard from people in Amber’s unit, I expected it to be primitive, but the bathroom was sparkling clean, and there was even a sleep field in the bedroom. The kitchen was strange, though.

“I think the kitchen unit is missing,” I said. Instead of the usual box with a display panel to show food options, the room Juniper had called a kitchen had multiple strange boxes I hadn’t seen before, and storage cabinets with table tops over them.

Juniper laughed. “It’s because this is an actual kitchen,” she said. “Most people at the sea farm cook their own food.”

“You can do that?” I asked, blankly. “Don’t you need special nutritional imprinting?”

“Don’t worry,” Juniper said. “There’s always options for Hive food, if you need them. And we’ve usually got someone bringing prepared food into the Haven to sell to the office workers at lunch time, if you’re willing to try sea farm food.”

I put my bag down in the living room and turned back to Juniper. “Where do you want me to start?”

“Take some time to get settled,” she suggested. “Your locker has been in storage, waiting for you to decide which apartment you wanted, but now that you’re here, I can have someone deliver it.”

I hated the idea of being alone in a strange apartment all day, and I wasn’t sure I was brave enough to venture out on my own. And from my insight into Juniper’s mind, I knew she had things to get started on.

“I’d rather get going,” I said. “I know you’ve got things you want to get to.”

“Are you sure?”

“Totally sure.” I followed Juniper back out into the hallway before noticing that the door didn’t have a lock pad. “How do I set my door code?”

“We use keys here,” Juniper said, and handed me a small metal object. She took a few minutes to show me how it worked, and cautioned me not to lose it. “We can get more,” she said, “but not in the middle of the night. You may want to have someone make you a copy.”

I put the key in my pocket and followed Juniper down the hallway and up one level to the Admiral’s command center. Juniper showed me everything — the community room, the kitchen area. She introduced me to everyone working in the offices behind the the main command center. 

“I’d like to start with final interviews for the drone repair position,” she told the Administrative Specialist. “Can you see if the candidates are available to meet today?”

The woman nodded. “Shouldn’t be a problem,” she said. “Although you may have to wait a bit for Danson — he’s been working up at the mines.”

I had an office all to myself, so I had somewhere to wait nervously and munch on a crunch cake. I wondered if Juniper was right that nobody would wonder what I was doing in an interview.

The first candidate, a young man named Hart, showed up not long after, and Juniper showed him into a meeting room. I looked down at my dataview before trying to reach out to Hart’s thoughts, hoping he would think any expressions on my face were because of things I was reading there on the dataview. 

I carefully imagined myself reaching out and found myself in his mind. No, Hart wasn’t wondering about me — he had assumed that Juniper had me to take notes for her, since she still had trouble with her hand. He was more worried that Juniper would ask him questions about specific repair techniques.

The next two candidates barely noticed me. Poppy was too busy worrying about the interview, and Danson was too busy boasting to Juniper. I had trouble getting an impression from Danson — my telepathic abilities must have been overworked — but managed a brief insight when shaking his hand at the end of the interview.

After the interviews were over, Juniper bought us sandwiches from a woman with a basket and brought me into her office.

“So? Any impressions?”

“You should hire Poppy,” I said.

“Really?” Juniper tilted her head. “Poppy seemed the least certain of her ability to repair the drones.”

“She was worried about the interview, and she didn’t want to promise you that she could fix every drone perfectly. She’s been fixing things at the glasshouses for years, though. The operators pay her to pick produce, but they count on her to fix the heating equipment whenever anything goes wrong. I think she has the skills, and she’s motivated. She’d like to be able to work from home, so she’s there when her children get back from school.”

“What about Danson?” Juniper asked.

I wrinkled my nose. “He just wanted to impress you. He’s never fixed anything before. He’s assuming it can’t be that hard, but I don’t think he understands what he’s getting into.”

Juniper unwrapped her sandwich, and gestured for me to do the same. I found the flavors stronger than I expected, but the bread was the best I’d ever tasted, and the seasoning mixed into the chopped egg filling was delicious.

“And Hart?” Juniper asked, after swallowing her first mouthful.

I set my sandwich back down. “Hart can’t fix anything either. His cousin Bracken asked him to apply for the job. Their plan is for Bracken to fix the drones.”

Juniper groaned. “Bracken’s a talented repair person, but he’s also a frequent trouble-maker. There’s no way Cador and Emblyn would have even considered giving him drone access.” She tapped the fingers of her right hand on the desk. “You really think Poppy can do this?”

“She thinks she can,” I said. “You could ask Cador and Emblyn to give her one drone to repair as a trial.”

“Good point.”

“Poppy would need tools,” I said. “She was worried about that. She wanted to ask you, but she was afraid it would mean she wouldn’t be considered at all.”

Juniper nodded. “I can ask Aster, Treeve’s widow, if she’d consider selling Poppy some of Treeve’s tools. Aster doesn’t need them now, and if Poppy bought them on installment, it’d give Aster some income as well.” She thought for a moment, and then nodded. “I agree. Poppy is the right choice. I’ll ask Cador and Emblyn to give her the first drone, and call on Aster to ask about the tools.”

I picked up my sandwich, feeling happy. I had feared arriving at the sea farm, but if I could help solve problems like this, my being there might be worthwhile.


	9. Chapter 9

The next few days were a whirlwind of meeting new people, checking on questions Juniper and Admiral Tregereth had had on their list to investigate once their borderline telepath arrived, and learning my way around the Haven. I ended each day exhausted by the use of my telepathic abilities. I could reach out into the minds of the people living at the sea farm, but I had to be careful to pace myself. Trying to get insights into more than a few minds at a time tended to tire me out.

When I finally got a chance to unpack my trunk, I found some new amateur bookettes, ones from other Zones I had never seen before. 

There was a note with them, in Hallie’s untidy scrawl. “From the Tactical Team. Good luck at the sea farm — we’re always here to help! PS: We did not let Lucas pick these out, he only likes boring speculative bookette authors with no kissing.”

I smiled. I might be here at the sea farm, but I knew Amber’s unit wouldn’t forget about me.

Admiral Tregereth and his wife, Tressa, invited me to dinner one evening. I had started getting used to the sea farm’s strange but delicious food, but nothing I had tried so far had prepared me for what Tressa served. She prepared a fish-based dish she called a casserole, but it was nothing like the bland casseroles of my childhood. It was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.

“Tressa’s a talented cook,” Juniper said the next day, when I asked her about it. “She’s got a knack for making even scraps delicious.”

Market day was another excitement. People at the sea farm could order some goods from the Hive, and craftspeople could take orders any time. But the closest thing the sea farm had to a shopping area was the weekly market, held in the Harbour area outside the Haven, rain or shine.

My old clothing from Teen Level was comfortable enough inside the Haven, but I was left melting hot every time Juniper and I had to go Outside, thanks to what Juniper explained was summer.

“Enjoy it while you can,” she told me. “It’ll be cold winter soon enough!”

I knew the weekly market would be my best chance to get clothing, or at least to find a vendor who could make me something. The money I was earning from my new position as a borderline telepath had been accumulating nicely while I trained in Amber’s unit. The clothing available at the sea farm might not have been the deliciously fashionable, high-level clothing Buzz favored, but I had seen other sea farm residents wearing some cute things I had liked. More importantly, buying more weather-appropriate clothing would mean I wouldn’t need to swelter in my long leggings and heavy tunic any more. 

I got up early the morning of Market, ready to spend. 

I was used to crowded shopping areas at the Hive, but the bright colors and shouting stallholders of Market presented an overwhelming appearance. It was like something out of an amateur bookette set in the far past, before the Hives. I wandered between the stalls, feeling out of place in my too-heavy Hive clothing.

The stalls covered everything I could want to buy, and many more things I wouldn’t. A table holding refurbished dataviews sat next to a bank of cages holding squawking, brightly-colored chickens. Across the way, I saw a weaver’s stall, with pieces of board holding fabrics for people who knew how to assemble their own clothing.

Fortunately, there were also market stalls catering to those who needed finished clothing. I found myself several pairs of the loose, cropped leggings that were called shorts, in a variety of soft colors. A few stalls along, I found a woman selling sleeveless tops and loose wraps.

“Perfect for those who have to work in the Haven,” she called out to me, hopefully. “You can wear the wrap to work, and not overheat on your way home!”

I didn’t have that problem, since I lived in the Haven, but I did like the idea of being able to take off an overwrap when Juniper and I had to go outside. I let the stall holder help me select several sets, in soft colors that matched my shorts.

At a third stall, I found a swimming costume, a towel to lay out on, and an oversized beach dress to wear over my swimming costume when going to and from the beach. Yet another stall held the skin cream Juniper had warned me to buy, to protect my skin from Truesun. I hadn’t had a chance to visit the beach yet, but I was looking forward to it. The Teen Beach and the Level 52 beach had always been wildly crowded. The beaches outside the Haven were always sparsely populated, even on days with perfect weather. 

I finished off my purchases with a large straw bag to hold everything, before treating myself to a pastry from a bakery stall. I didn’t recognize the berry filling, but it was delicious, with a tangy sweet cheese layer underneath. 

I was quickly learning that everything at the sea farm tasted better. I wasn’t sure if that was the sea air building my appetite, the way everyone said it did, or how fresh the food was, or how good everyone seemed to be at cooking.

A few days later, I got a chance to learn to cook myself.

“Another night of sandwiches,” Juniper said, one evening, as we prepared to leave for the night.

I was surprised. “You don’t know how to cook?”

“I do,” Juniper said gloomily, “but I’m still adjusting to my exoskeleton.” She wrinkled her nose. “The one time I tried, I couldn’t get the exoskeleton properly clean, and it smelt like fish for a week. I haven’t the control yet to use a glove over the exoskeleton, so….” She sighed. “My mother sent me a message saying she’s making my favorite tonight, but I’m not sure I’m ready for that. Not yet.”

I tried not to wander into other people’s minds by accident, but my telepathy skills were still new to me, and sometimes I couldn’t help it. Although she hadn’t told me about it, I knew from my accidental insights that Juniper’s relationship with her parents was strained because of things that had happened after she returned to the sea farm after her injury.

“I could cook it for you,” I offered. “If you show me how.”

Juniper brightened up a little. “Really?”

“I’d like to know how to use my kitchen,” I said. “I’m getting a little tired of sandwiches too. As long as you don’t mind if I ask stupid questions….”

“I’ll get us the ingredients,” Juniper said, jumping up.

Back in my apartment, Juniper walked me through the uses of all of the mysterious boxes that had come with my kitchen. Some of her explanations were confusing at first, but I found I could dip into her thoughts as she explained. Soon, we had a tray of fish in the box called an oven. The fish was covered with a creamy sauce and toasted breadcrumbs. The oven released a delicious scent, just like a kitchen unit running through a preparation cycle.

The greens Juniper had purchased cooked down quickly, and soon we had plates of baked fish, a steamed water-grain Juniper called rice, and greens.

“This is delicious,” Juniper said, after her first bite. “Are you sure you’ve never cooked before?”

I laughed. “I think you know I hadn’t!”

“You still picked it up faster than I’ve seen before, and I was one of the people helping the Blue Zonies learn when they all arrived.”

I flushed. “I may have seen a bit of how to do this in your head. I hope that’s not upsetting.”

Juniper studied me closely. “It’s not upsetting,” she said. “I understand that borderline telepaths rarely can control what they see.”

“It’s becoming a habit,” I admitted, looking away. “Everything’s so confusing here — I can’t always manage, but if I can reach out for an explanation, it’s so much easier.”

“That makes sense,” Juniper said briskly. “The Hive needs telepaths. I can’t imagine Amber’s unit would want you to hold back on using your gifts.”

“Do you think so?” I checked Juniper’s mind without thinking. Yes, she did think so. 

There was something else there, too, something connected to Tactical Commander Lucas, but I pulled back before I could see too much. Using my abilities when I hadn’t been asked to still felt shockingly rude, like walking in on someone undressed.

“I do think so,” Juniper said. She took another bite of the food. “Maybe we can cook together more often. This is just like home.”

I agreed, flushed with pride. But that night, as I unloaded the dishes from the washing unit, I found I couldn’t quite forget my accidental glimpse of Tactical Commander Lucas in Juniper’s thoughts.


	10. Chapter 10

“You look as dreary as the morning,” Juniper said, nodding towards the wide windows looking out over the ocean.

Weather at the sea farm was unpredictable, and today we’d woken up to slashing rain and uneasy waves. The mood inside the Admiralty offices was dull as well. Juniper and the Admiral had been working on something called a fishing stocks report for Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement, which seemed both deeply boring and extremely stressful at the same time.

With only the occasional crime from Sea Farm Security to keep me busy, and Juniper and the Admiral busy with their report, I could spend the day how I liked. I had planned on spending the day on the beach, lying in the sun and re-reading one of my favorite amateur bookettes. But the steely gray sky and slashing rain were hardly beach weather.

“Tactical Commander Lucas said you liked bookettes,” Juniper said. “You could go check out the library, if you like.”

“You have a library?” I asked, surprised. The Green Zone Amateur Press Association had a collection of amateur bookettes they called a library, but I had a feeling Juniper was talking about something different.

“Of course. We don’t have the sorts of bookettes you have at the Hive, but there’s books on technical trades, and some older bookettes that have collected over the years. We have a lot of people who aren’t imprinted. Most people do an apprenticeship, but the library is another resource for people to learn new skills.”

I dipped into Juniper’s thoughts and was surprised by an image of a giant room, filled with paper-bound bookettes, rather like the emergency manuals produced by the Hive’s printing press. “I’d like to see it,” I said.

Juniper gave me directions before going back to her reports. The library was in the inside of the third floor, and I found myself trading the gloom of the windows for the gloom of the interior lighting.

The Hive had symbols on doors to mark speciality areas such as medical areas and parks. The Haven used the same symbols as the Hive, but also used others, including symbols for veterinary care, Sea Farm Security, and more.

The symbol on the door to the library was one I had never seen before: an amateur bookette, pages open.

Inside, the room was hushed, but brighter-lit than the corridors. I had thought the image in Juniper’s mind must have been exaggerated — I had never seen that many paper bookettes in one place. But if anything, the library held more bookettes than I had seen in Juniper’s mind. 

I stood in the doorway, uncertain of where to start and whether I would be expected to check in or even get permission before looking at the bookettes. Even when we were sorting the quarterly print runs for the Green Zone Amateur Press Association, I hadn’t seen this many bookettes. And based on the different sizes and colors of the bookette spines, these all appeared to be different!

“Come on in,” called a voice. “The Library is open to all.”

“Really?” I asked, and then felt foolish. I made my way between the shelves to the back of the room, where the voice had come from.

A woman sat behind a desk. She was about my mother’s age, with dark skin and wavy dark hair.

“You must be the new Liaison working with Juniper,” she said. “She said you might be in. I’m Pearl, the Librarian here.”

I introduced myself. “I’m overwhelmed,” I admitted. “I’ve never seen this many bookettes together!”

The librarian made a harumphing sound. “They’re called books. No fancy bookette readers here.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and stopped myself from reaching out to her mind. “At the Hive, we called them amateur bookettes.”

“Hmmph.” This sounded like a less critical harumph. “I’m surprised you saw books at all at the Hive.”

“My best friend Marya and I were part of our Zone’s Amateur Press Association,” I said, and was gratified when the librarian nodded.

“Some of their books are passable,” she said. “We don’t stock many — as you can see, our bread and butter here is books on basic skills, and reprints of Hive-approved classic literature. But I’ve ordered the odd few books from the Hive amateur presses for a special request from a library patron.” She smiled when she saw the expression on my face. “All of our basic skill guides come from the Hive central presses. They pass along your Amateur Press Association catalogues while they’re at it. We do have the odd patron who likes reading stories, and the odd child who’s Hive-mad and wants to read about life at the Hive.”

“I’m not sure how accurate a picture they’d get from amateur bookettes,” I admitted.

“Most of them grow past it.” She harumphed again, this one a contemplative harumph. “Can’t see it at all, myself. I left the Hive and never looked back.”

“You’re from the Hive?”

“Lottery of 2487,” she said. “I worked as an Information Specialist for Hive Information Archive for a few years, but found I couldn’t stand being required to turn away information requests. When they offered me a position as an actual librarian, I jumped, and I haven’t looked back.”

As I browsed the shelves, Pearl helped me select a few books — several amateur bookettes from the Hive, and several others she called “classics.” 

“From the times before the Hive,” she said. “They’re not often seen in the original form these days. You might be familiar with the bookette adaptations, though.”

She walked me through checking out books, how long I’d be able to keep them in my apartment to read, and the hours when the library would be open. 

I hugged the books to my chest. “Thank you,” I said. I’d have to remember to bring my straw bag the next time I came back.

* * *

Summer passed, filled with long, golden days on the beach and the occasional case from Sea Farm Security.

Soon enough, the weather turned. The days began growing shorter, and the storms came in more frequently, lashing the Haven with wind and rain. Juniper laughed when I asked if this was winter.

“Only autumn,” she said. “It gets worse from here.”

My Hive clothing, so hot in the summer, was suddenly too thin to wear. I bought new clothing from the market, warm clothing with long sleeves. 

Autumn also meant bringing in the crops from the fields in Harvest. I found myself helping with the potato harvest for a week. There was a discrepancy in the reports of the potato crop that had Juniper nervous. I signed myself up as temporary labor at a different set of fields each day, trailing the horse-drawn harvester that turned up the earth and revealed the potatoes. The potatoes were dusty and dry, and I found my hands growing cracked and dirty, even after I washed them.

My work was rewarded when we found the right field, and my insights into the farmer’s mind made the reasons for the potato discrepancy clear. Juniper had been right to be nervous. My insights let her lead Sea Farm Security to something called a still, hidden in an old stone house at the boundary of Harvest. The thoughts of the man leading the potato conspiracy hadn’t told me what a still might be, but the tinge of guilt and worry in his thoughts had attracted my attention immediately.

I asked Juniper about it, afterwards, and she explained what alcohol was. I hadn’t ever heard about it, back at the Hive.

“The Admiral is willing to turn a blind eye to someone making ale or plum wine for their own household,” Juniper explained. “Letting small-scale brewing pass without punishment means we can keep a closer eye on things. But if someone has been making hard spirits to supply the Hive….” She trailed off. 

I hadn’t heard of hard spirits before, and had to reach out to Juniper’s mind for an explanation. What I saw convinced me that it was better the people at the Hive not know.


	11. Chapter 11

Autumn gave way to winter. The storms became wilder, with snow and ice falling from the sky, just as Eli had told me they might. The people of the sea farm moved into the Haven, or into the large agricultural structures in High Fold that provided protection to the livestock. 

The Haven still seemed spacious to me, but people from the sea farm obviously felt like they were crowded in. I picked up thoughts of being packed like a fish in a net in more than one person’s mind. Juniper and I helped Sea Farm Security with several fights and other conflicts.

Between our cases, I found myself down in the library more often, looking for new books.

“Make yourself useful,” Pearl said one afternoon, after I’d taken down, examined, and replaced eight different books. “Go help me sort the backlog.”

She showed me to a back room I hadn’t been in before. There were shelves here too, disorderly ones, crammed full of books in various stages of age and disrepair.

“Everyone dumps books at the Library,” Pearl explained. “The Hive doesn’t want people reading them, but they don’t want to lose the information, either. So when things are slow, I check whether the information in the book is included in the Hive’s Central Data Storage before making a final decision about whether to add the book to the library here, send the book to Hive Central Data Storage for scanning, or handle the book another way.”

She gave me a sharp look. “Some of the information in these books is restricted. From what Juniper has told me, I’m guessing that you know how to keep your mouth shut.”

I wondered just what Juniper had — and hadn’t — said.

“I can,” I said, uncomfortably.

“Good.” She paused. “You’ll be working from the outside of the books for now. If anything flags as Restricted, set it aside on this shelf, and don’t open it.” She pointed to a shelf with a RESTRICTED tag. “I’ll handle the restricted books from there.”

She walked me through the other steps of the process, including how to use my dataview to scan the codes on the backs of the books.

“It’s likely Hive Central Data Storage already has all of this lot,” she told me. “They were found in an old bunker up past High Fold this past summer, and I haven’t had a chance to get to processing them yet.”

The book sorting was a pleasant change of pace from sitting at my desk in the Admiral’s offices, or sitting in my apartment, staring out at the unsettled sea. I made my way through the first shelf before I let myself start looking at the titles.

The books were from all eras — some from before the time of the Hives, even. I found those the most interesting, and was happy to see several of them make the list of books that could be safely lent to the sea farm’s library patrons. 

I had just added another novel to the Restricted pile when I saw it. A book from early Hive days, based on the type of code on the back. The cover was luridly printed in shades of orange and gold, with a picture of an eye in a pyramid with rays streaming from it. 

The author had three names. Modern bookettes were produced by teams, who had their team name on the bookette, and amateur bookette authors generally invented their own pen name, often based on their Zone and genre of interest. Any author finding publication with two or more names was either pre-Hive or very early in the Hive days.

I opened the book, and was startled by what I saw.

> With new citizens applying to enter the Hive system every day to escape from the terrible depredations of the storms Outside, we who are in the Hive already are left to wonder — how will they be watched? How will our great Councils and elected bodies be able to effectively manage and oversee the new citizens as they swell our numbers?
> 
> The candidates for Hive Governance have presented their own plans to the citizens of the Hive. Some of them sensible, like increasing funding for surveillance and oversight; others ludicrous, like devoting an entire Level of the great Hive we all live in solely to Health and Safety, and preventing those choosing a career in that field from intermingling with those in other areas of the Hive. However, I find myself disposed to propose an even wilder scheme: that the Hive’s Health and Safety forces make use of the native talents of telepathy that lie within us all.

I blinked. No wonder certain books were restricted! In two paragraphs, the author had revealed the secrets of telepathy, indicated that people once chose their careers, and suggested that the Hive itself was once governed by popular vote, the way hobby groups like the Green Zone Amateur Press Association were. It couldn’t possibly be true, but....

I went to scan the code on the back of the book, but stopped. Surely there wasn’t any harm in reading a little further before I inevitably put the book into the Discard pile.

I looked around, feeling guilty, and then kept reading. The author seemed to be writing for an audience who didn’t know about nosies, and might not even have believed telepathy was real.

_Imagine it,_ he wrote. _Each Area — perhaps even each residential block — could have its own telepath, keeping safe watch over the members of their community. Surely the community would welcome their benevolent oversight, knowing, in their wisdom, that the telepaths must look within the hearts and minds of even the innocent to uncover those unsafe elements among us._

I thought of how the typical Hive resident reacted to the presence of nosies and snorted. Whoever this author was, he hadn’t known his fellow Hive residents as well as he thought.

I read on. While discussing the cost of his scheme, the author mentioned something about the “proposal for beaches in the new Zones,” which confused me for a moment until I remembered Eli telling me that the Hive had been constructed in stages. Whenever this author was writing, Turquoise Zone and my home zone of Green Zone must not have existed yet!

The most interesting bit was at the end. The author was telling his audience about developing their own telepathic abilities:

> In such a large group of people as a Hive, surely thousands must possess some measure of telepathic talent — but it can only be uncovered if one is willing to practice! The following exercises will reveal if you have telepathic abilities, and will help you to hone them, that you may assist in the great work of keeping your home area safe from the depredations of the predators among us.

Pearl walked in just then, and I jumped.

“Got caught up in reading?” she asked.

I felt my face flush. “I’m sorry!”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “It happens to me every time I sort books too. That’s why the shelves are so full!” She paused. “Just make sure it’s not one of the Restricted books.”

“It’s not,” I said. I was horribly aware that while I wasn’t technically lying, I wasn’t telling the truth either. The book hadn’t been coded Restricted, but only because I hadn’t checked it yet.

Pearl collected the pile of books that had been coded as safe to add to the library’s collection, and nodded at me. “You’re doing fine,” she said.

I felt horribly guilty as she left, and went to scan the book to confirm its status on the Discard pile before something stopped me.

The author of the book thought people could develop their psychic talents. I knew I would never have Amber’s skills, but perhaps I could develop the skills I did have. I knew I would be more useful to Juniper if I could read more minds at a time, and if I didn’t get so tired after reading them. Surely that would be in the Hive’s interest? And as a telepath, I already saw restricted information, in the imprints of the people around me whose jobs required it.

I impulsively moved the book to the upper shelves, where I knew it would stay until Pearl or I got to it. Surely there was no harm in waiting a little while.


	12. Chapter 12

I had hoped to go back to the Hive for New Year, but the schedule at the sea farm was very different from what I was used to.

Instead of the week of celebrations that led up to New Year at the Hive, the people of the sea farm spent the week before New Year preparing for the Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement census. It was a tense time filled with inspections and preparations. I found myself running all over the Haven and sometimes even other parts of the sea farm, following up on requests from Juniper and the Admiral to get to the bottom of various problems.

I had given in and read the exercises in the book about telepathy. Some of them seemed silly, but a few of them, like closing my eyes and focusing in a very particular way on what the author called “the space of the mind,” had been helpful. I began getting up an hour earlier in the morning to work through the helpful exercises, trying to focus my mind in just the right way. 

Between my hour of exercises in the morning and all the mind-reading Juniper and the Admiral needed for their preparations for the census, I found myself bone-tired each night — much too tired to do more than eat prepared sandwiches and tumble into bed. But the exercises had been too helpful to give up.

New Year itself was celebrated at the sea farm with a nice meal the evening before. Juniper and I were both invited to spend the celebration with the Admiral and his extended family. The Admiral’s family brought a live tree in from Outside, and we spent the afternoon decorating it with tiny toys. The Admiral and Tressa’s grandchildren were adorable, asking for story after story from Juniper and I until it was time to sit down to eat. Tressa served a delicious dinner, with so many different delicacies that I couldn’t see how she could have had time to cook them all. Afterwards, Juniper and I sat back with the other adults and watched the children unwrap presents.

As children, Elodie and I had always woken early on New Year and dragged our mother out of bed, unable to wait any longer for the brightly-wrapped presents in the corner. The toys the Admiral’s grandchildren unwrapped were different from ours — far fewer gadgets and games, and more handmade items, like dolls and train sets. But the love and magic of the holiday were still there. 

I thought of my mother and Elodie, back at the Hive. Elodie would be at Teen Level celebrations tonight with the other seventeen-year-olds, all of them already nervous with anticipation for Lottery. Carnival was only a few months away. My mother would be with friends, singing New Year songs at the local medical area and elderly housing blocks before finishing the night with the traditional hot beverages and cakes at the party in the local park. Tomorrow, Elodie would leave Teen Level to spend the entire day with my mother, eating special New Year foods and watching the silly traditional New Year romance bookettes my mother loved.

Gifts at New Year were usually given only to children, but as I couldn’t be present myself for the celebrations, I had sent gifts to my family. I hoped my mother would enjoy the hand-woven tunic, in the muted colors she favored, and I knew Elodie would love the brightly colored straw beach bag I had found. I had also sent a traditional sea farm dessert I had baked myself, one Juniper had said would keep and travel well.

Instead of celebrations, the day of New Year itself brought aircraft filled with auditors to carry out the Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement census. 

With Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement checking every resident’s genetic code and poking into every store room and barn, everyone at the sea farm was on their best behavior. I was surprised to find they checked my genetic code as well, until Juniper explained that this was to record me as a resident for future censuses.

To keep out of the auditors’ way, I spent most of the week in the library, helping Pearl with her backlog of book sorting. I cleared all the other books in the backlog before I gave in and sorted the book with the exercises. I had learned all of them by heart by now, the useful and the useless, and figured there was no reason to risk further delay. But my heart still sank when I finally scanned the code, and saw it come up as Restricted.

Finally, the Joint Hive Treaty Enforcement auditors left, and the sea farm was left quiet. I found myself unexpectedly let down. Somehow, I had thought winter would be over when they left. Instead, Juniper informed me that we had a couple months to go before the weather warmed again.

“It always seems endless in the lead-up to Carnival,” she said. “But don’t worry. It might pass faster than you think.”

* * *

It was nearly lunchtime, and I had been thinking about the sandwich I had packed for lunch. Fresh-baked bread from one of the Haven’s best bakers, a thick layer of the fresh cheese made up at High Fold, a seasoning spread I had made myself out of summer herbs, and hearty tomatoes and lettuce from the glasshouses in Tropics. Unless Sea Farm Security caught a case, that sandwich was likely to be the high point of my work day. 

I found myself wondering if I should ask Juniper for the afternoon off. I knew couldn’t tell her why, though. There was no way to explain that I had found a set of telepathy exercises in a Restricted book, or that I had been using them.

Over the past week, I had become gradually aware of a strange sensation during my morning telepathy exercises. I had become able to better visualize what the author called the “space of the mind” — and I had started feeling the edges, the spaces just out of my mind’s view. I had a strange sense that there was something there, something blocking me, and that if I only pushed hard, I could press past it.

I had been worrying all week about whether or not to try. The author hadn’t said anything about this. There seemed to be risk either way. I knew how much more I could do for Juniper and Admiral Tregereth if my abilities were stronger, but if I overstretched my talents —

That was when Juniper came up to my desk. “Come with me,” she said. “We’ve got something for you at the hangar.”

I jumped up. I knew Sea Farm Security had had problems, over the years, with unauthorized people breaking into the aircraft hangar. I had even spent a few nights there, hidden in a corner, waiting to see if anyone tried to break in. So far, there were no breaks in the case.

In the hangar, the scheduled flight from the Hive was unloading. I looked at Juniper, unsure of what she wanted, only to see her nod back towards the aircraft.

“It’s your New Year surprise,” she said. “A little belated, I’m afraid.”

I looked back, even more confused — until I saw a girl in a bulky coat step down. Elodie was at the sea farm!


	13. Chapter 13

“Elodie!” I hugged my sister before stepping back. “Does the Hive know you’re here? Did you —” I looked back at Juniper and lowered my voice. “Did you run away?”

Elodie snorted. “Of course not. You have no faith in me.”

I narrowed my eyes at her, and she blushed. “Fine. I thought about trying, but I had no idea where the hangars are, much less how to go about sneaking onto a flight. Fortunately, your Liaison team back at the Hive reached out to Mom and me to see if we wanted to visit you after New Year. Mom couldn’t leave work, but they were able to set up my travel as a Teen Level special enrichment programme so I could come.”

“And you can handle Outside?” I asked, anxiously aware that the hangar doors were open. The Haven’s hangar crew didn’t block the view of Outside from the passengers unloading unless there were special circumstances.

“I may have explored a little,” Elodie admitted. “It’s so cold right now!”

“It’s winter,” Juniper explained, and I realized I was being terribly rude. I introduced Juniper and Elodie to one another, and they started chatting about weather.

“The Liaison team got me fully prepared,” Elodie said, holding out the arms of her winter coat. “I can’t believe it gets cold enough to need this!”

Juniper told me that barring emergencies, I’d get the afternoons off during Elodie’s visit, and shooed us away. I showed Elodie my apartment and we dropped off her bag.

She insisted on going back out into the Haven right away. That was Elodie — always excited to explore a new place, no matter how scary I found it. Over the next few days, she got to try my cooking, explore the abandoned levels of the Haven, and visit the market, which was held inside during the winter.

There was even a day warm enough for Elodie to go for a run Outside, along the track followed by the sea farm’s land train. Elodie dragged me along with her, and I found myself puffing up the hill from Tropics to Harvest. I nearly caught up with her on the hills across High Fold, but she left me in her dust on the final stretch, pounding down the steep hill towards Harbour.

“That was like flying,” she said afterwards, her eyes sparkling. “Can we go swimming next?”

I dragged her back inside the Haven with some choice words about the dangers of the ocean in winter. 

With me spending my mornings with my mental exercises and at the office, Elodie quickly made friends with several other teens near her own age. We always met for the afternoon, and then Elodie helped me cook dinner for the two of us. 

Juniper joined us one evening, and let Elodie pester her for endless stories about growing up at the sea farm. I cooked my most adventurous meal yet, a strange but delicious combination of noodles and steamed shellfish that Tressa had given me the recipe for.

I usually shut the window coverings at night, to keep out the view of the dark sea, but Elodie insisted on having them open. This evening was clear, and the moon hung low and full over the ocean, casting a trail of shining light over the waves.

“Have you ever been at the Hive?” Elodie asked Juniper, once dinner was over and we were relaxing with my favorite crunch cakes, which Elodie had brought from the Hive.

“Only once.” Juniper waved her left arm in its exoskeleton. “After this happened.”

“I’m sorry,” Elodie said. “I didn’t realize.”

“It’s okay,” Juniper said. “It’s strange — I worked so hard at my apprenticeship, hoping to become a Sea Captain. But from what Tactical Commander Lucas has told me, Lottery always would have assigned me to be Sea Farm Admiral.” She paused, staring out at the moon over the ocean. “I suppose this way, I got to choose.”

“I wish I got to choose whether to accept my Lottery result,” Elodie said. “It’s not like that for anyone, back at the Hive.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. I couldn’t ever tell anyone that I had made the choice to come to the sea farm. I especially couldn’t tell Elodie.

“Lottery at the Hive is different,” I said, instead. “We’ve got many more jobs for people, so everyone can be matched to something they love.”

“Do you love your job?” Elodie asked me.

I thought for a moment. “I do,” I said, realizing as I said it that it was true.

Whatever I might have hoped for from my Lottery, I knew the sea farm wasn’t it. And I certainly hadn’t expected to come out of Lottery as a borderline telepath. But I knew I was making a difference here, helping Sea Farm Security and Juniper, and keeping people safe. I had come to love the slower pace of life at the sea farm, too. Buying ingredients to make myself a meal. Helping Pearl in the library on slow days. Wandering through the market on market days. Getting to know my neighbors.

Juniper smiled. “Your sister has been an invaluable asset to us here.”

“I still don’t understand what a liaison does,” Elodie complained. “But I’m glad she’s happy.”

She stared out at the ocean, a pensive look on her face. I could tell she was brooding on her Lottery.

* * *

I woke at my usual time the next morning, but Elodie was already gone. She had taken a package of crunch cakes from the kitchen and left a note, saying she had left early to go exploring with some of her new sea farm friends. _Should be back by lunch,_ I read.

I did my morning telepathy exercises and showered, not thinking anything of it. Elodie had lived alone on Teen Level for nearly five years, and Juniper had said her new sea farm friends were from the Apprenticeship of the Seas program, and already thinking of their future careers. Perhaps they had taken her down to the boatwright’s area at Harbour.

Work that morning was busy, with checks on several suspects who had been seen near the location of a broken security drone. I identified the culprit, and even managed to get enough details to develop a plausible tip for Juniper to pass on anonymously to Sea Farm Security. 

Elodie wasn’t home yet when I returned to my apartment at lunchtime, so I made myself a sandwich and read for a while. 

The book was one I hadn’t read before, one of the finds from the library, and I got caught up in reading before realizing that the shadows from the window were long across my floor. Elodie still wasn’t back. 

Realization dawned on me, slow and horrifying. Something was wrong. Elodie was a risk-taker, but she didn’t like for people to worry. If she had been detained, she would have called me.

I got out my dataview and tried to call her, only to get a strange message I had never seen before, telling me that the requested dataview was out of range. 

I pocketed my dataview and Elodie’s note, and ran down the corridors and up the stairs to the Admiral’s offices.

“It’s Elodie,” I said, running up to Juniper. “She said she’d be back at lunch, but she never showed up, and now I can’t call her dataview.”

Juniper’s face was grave. “Sea Farm Security got reports from several concerned parents,” she said. “Apparently the Apprenticeship of the Seas had a day off today, and some of the apprentices decided to go exploring.”

I handed Juniper the note that Elodie had left me. “I think Elodie’s with them. Are any of the others answering their dataviews?”

“None of them are in range,” Juniper said. “They can’t all have suffered catastrophic dataview failure at the same time. There’s only a few places where a dataview wouldn’t get a signal — but I can’t imagine that a girl from the Hive would ever…..”

“Elodie would,” I said immediately. “Whatever you’re thinking, if it’s dangerous and interesting, Elodie would.”

“We’ve got Sea Farm Security out checking all the regular black spots where dataviews and drones can’t get a signal,” Juniper said. “But if they don’t find them at one of those….”

I felt tears prickling at my eyes. Elodie was missing!


	14. Chapter 14

“Don’t panic yet,” Juniper said. “They may still be up in the black spot at the reservoir, and have lost track of time. We’ve got a Sea Farm Security officer on his way there now.”

“Elodie wouldn’t have lost track of time like that,” I said. “What if they’re out at sea?”

“We know they aren’t.” Juniper’s words were reassuring, but her voice wasn’t. “We’ve got security cameras on the Harbour. We’d have seen a boat going out. The fleet’s been out fishing for three days, so they can’t have begged a ride with them.”

I could tell there was something she wasn’t telling me. I reached into her mind and saw it.

I gasped. “You think they’re in the abandoned belt link between the Hive and the sea farm!”

Juniper took my arm and steered me into my office before shutting the door. “Yes,” she said. “Officially, the belt link has been closed for centuries.” 

She sighed. “Unofficially, we keep finding old entrances. It’s become a rite of passage for sea farm teens, to find an entrance and see how far into the belt link tunnel they can go.”

I had seen all of this in Juniper’s worries about Elodie and the other teens who had gone missing. The other teens were all good students, good apprentices, but the sea farm rewarded risk taking in ways the Hive never could. Juniper knew — from her own experiences growing up at the sea farm, and from her Sea Farm Admiral’s imprint — that a certain amount of this sort of exploration was normal for sea farm teens.

The problem was the time. Sea farm teens usually didn’t like being underground, and didn’t stay in the belt link tunnel for longer than a few hours. Elodie wasn’t the only one who’d planned to be back before now. If they weren’t home yet, something had gone wrong. 

The old belt link was attractive to teens because it was off-limits, and the reason it was off-limits was because it was dangerous. Without regular maintenance, the tunnel could become flooded, or even cave in. 

Sea Farm Security had reopened a door to the tunnel some years earlier, because of this exact sort of situation. Better to have a safe tunnel entrance under constant surveillance, so they could enter in an emergency, without the delay of finding whatever new entrance the sea farm teens had worked out.

“We’ve already got Sea Farm Security searching the tunnel,” Juniper said. “The problem is that the tunnel is a black area, with limited signal range for our drones. Sea Farm Security staff have had to enter the tunnel to search.”

“I want to help,” I said, immediately. “Being underground doesn’t bother me.”

Juniper’s face changed to an expression of sympathy. “I know, but the tunnel is dangerous for even trained searchers. If you got hurt, we’d have to suspend the search to help you.”

I bit my lip.

“You’ll hear everything the second we do,” Juniper assured me. “They can’t have gotten too far in.”

She opened the door to leave, and I sat down heavily at my desk. My sister was missing, and there wasn’t anything I could do.

* * *

The wait felt endless. Finally, Juniper came in.

I jumped up. “Do you have news?”

She shut the door behind herself, and my heart sunk.

“We know they’re not in any of the other black spots,” Juniper said. “We know they’re not at sea. We also reached out to Hive Defense at the coastal patrol base, who confirmed the last location their dataviews were logged. There’s a tunnel entrance near there. We’re as sure as we can be that that’s where they went.”

I could feel a but coming, and reached out into Juniper’s mind. “You still haven’t found them?”

Juniper’s face was serious. “By setting up signal relays, we’ve sent drones further into the tunnel than they can possibly have walked at this point. We haven’t seen them yet.”

“Where could they be?” I asked.

“It’s possible the drones missed them somehow,” Juniper said. “It’s also possible they found a place where the tunnel connects to one of the natural cave systems in the area. We have all of the sea farm’s spelunkers out to help with the search.”

I pulled the meaning of “spelunker” from Juniper’s head. Apparently some people at the sea farm enjoyed exploring underground caverns for fun, rather like the Rambler’s Association at the Hive enjoyed going Outside for fun. Juniper didn’t understand how anyone could enjoy exploring cramped spaces underground, but their experience and equipment were invaluable in situations like this one.

“There’s one other thing we could try,” Juniper said. “We’ve got an aircraft from the coastal patrol base on its way here. I know you’re a borderline telepath, but is there a chance, any chance at all, that you could get an insight into their position from outside the tunnel?”

I didn’t know. My morning telepathy exercises had improved my range and my stamina, but I didn’t know if they had improved them enough to see through the earth itself. Nothing I had gone through had prepared me for these stakes.

“My sister is down there,” I said fiercely. “I have to try.”

* * *

I ran for the hangar. The aircraft was already there when I arrived.

The pilot introduced himself as Ralston, and assured me that he knew about the telepath secrets.

“I’ve worked with Amber’s team before,” he said. “I’ll be coordinating the search with Juniper’s team. You’ll be off comms, so you can say anything you need to say to me.”

“Thank you,” I said. He waved me to the seat next to him, and helped show me how to strap in. I had barely gotten the buckle fastened before the aircraft was taking off again.

Outside, darkness was already falling. It had snowed a few days earlier, and the fields of Harvest were a patchwork of white and brown as we flew over.

“I’ll follow the path of the tunnel first,” Ralston said, taking us down much closer to the ground than the aircraft that had brought me to the sea farm. “There’s a limit to how low I can fly. Let me know if you get any hint, and we can circle back around to the same position for a longer look, or even land, if there’s a flat surface.”

I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, ignoring the queasiness in my stomach. My morning exercises were second-nature by now, and I found myself automatically dropping into what the author had called “the space of the mind.”

I felt Pilot Ralston’s mind, next to me. I had the sense, again, that something was blocking me from reaching out, from seeing further.

I hesitated, but only for a moment. My sister was missing, and others with her. If there was any chance I could help her —

I took another deep breath, and pushed at the invisible barrier with all my strength. 

And felt something shatter.

I gasped. I could hear Pilot Ralston saying something beside me, his voice concerned, but I waved him off. I had to keep my eyes closed, keep my concentration. My mind-space had shattered open, and I was trying to keep my hold on it.

I could feel the Haven behind us now, an indistinct blur of many minds together. Below us were a few more minds, moving slowly past as Pilot Ralston flew.

“We just passed the searchers,” I said. “In the tunnel.”

There was a pause before Pilot Ralston spoke. “Confirmed. You could feel that?”

“I could.” I kept my eyes shut, searching with everything in my mind for even a whisper of another mind below us. My telepathy had never been entirely reliable. If it failed now —

I made myself breathe, tried to relax into the seat and forget everything but my mind space around me as we flew on.

“We’re at the end of the likely range they could have walked to,” Pilot Ralston said, finally. “Should we do another round, or go fly over the cavern systems?”

I kept my eyes shut. “One more pass over the tunnel, please.”

He flew. I measured the moments in lifetimes, searching, searching, for even a hint —

— there.

“Turn,” I said, uncertainly, pointing. “That way.”

I felt the aircraft shift underneath me. The indistinct minds grew closer, and I tried to point the way, hoping that I hadn’t just found a stone house inhabited by sea farm residents who didn’t like living in the Haven for the winter. 

Finally, we were over the minds I had felt. I kept breathing, and tried to push away the awareness of my physical body. To exist only in the mind-space.

There was a weightless moment, and then I-not-I opened my eyes into near-darkness.

“I’ve got Morrell’s dataview switched to light view and strapped to my head securely as I can,” I said, eyeing the rock face in front of me. I knew the dataview’s power supply was nearly drained, but some light would be better than nothing. I had to keep my own dataview’s power supply to light my way back to the main tunnel and call for help.

“It’s not safe, Elodie.” 

The Kate part of me didn’t know that voice. The part of me that was seeing through Elodie’s eyes did. The other speaker was Iris, one of the other missing teens. I-as-Elodie respected her, but I also knew she was wrong. 

I shook my head. “One of us has to go.” I had done the first aid activities on Teen Level — had attended the emergency warden trainings as my corridor’s emergency warden. I knew what the twisted angle of Morrell’s leg meant as well as the others did. And I was the only one who wasn’t scared to be underground alone.

“It’s just a little climb,” I said, trying to keep my voice reassuring. “I’ll get back to the main tunnel and get help. They’ll be searching for us by now, surely.”

“We should stay together,” Iris insisted. “You don’t have a safety rope. Trying to free-climb that cliff is suicide.”

“It’s our only chance,” I said, looking up into the darkness above me. I had climbed all the time at the Teen Level beach. This was just another climb. Another climb without safety ropes and a climbing instructor and the warm suns of the beach lighting my way —

I took a deep breath. Maybe it was stupid to try, like Iris said. But it was still the best shot we had.

On the aircraft, I opened my eyes, disoriented by the sudden lights of the control panel in front of me. “You have to find them right now,” I said, panicking. “Elodie’s about to try something stupidly risky!”


	15. Chapter 15

Pilot Ralston hit another button, and Juniper’s holographic face appeared in front of me. “You’ve found them?” she asked.

“I have,” I said. “Pilot Ralston can send you the coordinates. They’re underground, in a cavern. It must have branched off the tunnel, because Elodie is talking about going back to the tunnel to find help. But they’re trapped at the bottom of a cliff or something, because she’s about to try climbing back up.” I swallowed. “She doesn’t have a rope. You have to find her. Please.”

Juniper hit some buttons, and another holographic face appeared, this one of a man with a neat beard.

“Is there an underground cavern at these coordinates?” Juniper asked.

The man studied something out of range from the holo. “Not one we’ve mapped,” he said. “But there’s a large cave system not far away. We’ve never pushed that far in because of safety concerns, but the caverns continue on — there could be a connection to the tunnel.” 

“Bring the drones searching the tunnel back to the closest point to that position,” Juniper said. “Tell them to focus on any irregularities in the eastern wall.”

My head was throbbing, but I risked reaching my awareness back down to Elodie, just for a moment. She had started her climb. Her hands were cramping on the wet rock, but she knew she had to hold on. Had to get out to find help.

It felt like a lifetime before I heard the shout from Juniper. “Sea Farm Security reports a passage in the eastern tunnel wall! It’s hidden behind a fallen block of stone. Sending a drone in now.”

Another agonizing wait. Finally, Juniper shouted again. “We have a signal from their dataviews! They’re here!”

“Make sure you bring ropes,” I said. “And one of the boys is injured. Morrell. There’s something wrong with his leg. You’ll need a stretcher.”

I closed my eyes again and saw through Elodie’s eyes as the cavern above me suddenly lit with blinding light, heard the whirring of the drone. “We’re down here!” I shouted, loud as I dared, keeping my grip on my narrow hand-holds. “Help!”

I ignored the throbbing in my head, keeping my awareness with my sister until Sea Farm Security had helped her up the final part of the cliff, sore and unsteady, but finally safe. She immediately turned to the Sea Farm Security officer leading the group to explain what was happening at the bottom. What Morrell’s injuries were.

Elodie was safe. I relaxed into the aircraft seat.

Pilot Ralston shook my shoulder, gently. “Kate? Kate!”

“I’m fine,” I said. My head felt like it might explode, but Elodie was safe. “I’m fine, Pilot Ralston. She’s safe. We can go back to the sea farm now.”

* * *

Juniper insisted on getting me into the sea farm medical centre as soon as we landed in the hangar. I thanked Pilot Ralston and stepped down, surprised to find my feet unsteady for a moment.

“We’re getting you checked out,” Juniper said. “You look white as a sheet.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Just a headache. Megan….” I couldn’t think. “Something for the pain.”

The doctor insisted on running a full diagnostic before giving me two tablets. I took them, marveling as they took effect and the pain receded from my head.

They brought Morrell in first, and the doctor left me to tend to his leg. One by one, the missing teens were brought in and checked by the medical professionals. One by one, their families came into the medical centre to hug them, to yell at them, and — except for Morrell, who would be staying in the medical centre for treatment — to take them home.

Elodie was the very last. She walked in beside a Sea Farm Security officer, her expression guilty.

“I had to stay to help with the rescue,” she said.

I stood up and hugged her, hard.

“If you do anything like that ever again, they’ll never let you back to the sea farm,” I said. “They already might not, and you would deserve it.”

Elodie hugged me back. “I’m sorry, Kate.”

I wanted to yell at her. To tell her never to do anything like this again. But I had been in my sister’s head, and I knew that exploring, taking risks, was part of her, the way my love for books was part of me. 

And I wanted to tell her how proud I was. She had risked her life, climbing that cliff in the near-dark to try to save the others. I just hoped Lottery would know what to do with her.

I hugged her harder. We could argue in the morning, after the doctors had checked Elodie out and we had both gotten some sleep. For now, I was just grateful to have my sister back.

* * *

Elodie spent her last few days at the Sea Farm being a model visitor. I sent her back to the Hive with a plas-bag of cookies for our mother, a new tunic from the market, and instructions to stay out of trouble. She had promised that she would. I expected that promise to last all of a week.

Juniper came to the hangar with us to see her off.

“You just want to make sure she’s really gone,” I joked, as the aircraft flew away.

Juniper grinned. “You think sea farm teens need someone like Elodie to get into trouble? Trust me, they’ve plenty of experience on their own.”

She paused. “We haven’t talked about it,” she said. “What you did that night.”

I looked around. We were in the hangar, but nobody was paying attention to us. “I’m still not sure what I did,” I said. 

I wasn’t lying, but I wasn’t telling the full truth, either. Since that night, I’d found my mind-space, my awareness of the people around me, expanding by the day. As long as I could shut my eyes and concentrate, I could see into the minds around me, and even see through their eyes. Feel what they were feeling, sense what they sensed. I couldn’t see as many thought levels as Amber, but I knew that I wasn’t the same borderline telepath who had arrived at the sea farm. 

“You don’t have to explain anything to me,” Juniper said. “But you may need to explain things to someone else.”

With my newly expanded telepathic awareness, I could already tell who she was talking about.


	16. Chapter 16

I expected them to come right away, but it was nearly a week before I came home from helping out at the library to find Tactical Commander Lucas outside my apartment door.

He was flanked by several guards from Amber’s unit. Eli was there, looking serious, but when I caught his eye he gave me a conspiratorial wink.

“Kate.” Lucas nodded. “Can we talk in your apartment?”

I closed my eyes and reached out into Lucas’s mind. I couldn’t help myself — if he had done what I thought he might have — if he had set up the whole thing, put Elodie into danger —

I concentrated. Lucas’s thoughts were more complex than any of the people I had read at the sea farm, racing past me at express belt speed, but I could see a few things. He had hoped that sending me to the sea farm might develop my abilities, but he wasn’t behind what had happened to Elodie.

He had never even been sure that what I had done was possible. Even when Megan had panicked and insisted that I leave Amber’s unit immediately, because telepaths must never meet —

My eyes flew open. “That’s why I had to leave Amber’s unit so suddenly?”

Lucas stepped closer. “We need to find someplace private,” he said, significantly, and I caught a stray worry from one of the Strike Team about my reactions blowing my cover as a mere liaison.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Of course. Come inside.”

I unlocked my door, and was surprised when a Strike Team member I didn’t recognize, a woman about the age of Amber’s Strike Team Leader, insisted on going inside first. She checked the interior of my apartment thoroughly before coming back out again.

“All clear,” she reported.

Lucas raised his chin. “All clear — ?”

“All clear, Tactical Commander Lucas, Sir.” 

Lucas’s eyes sparkled, and he led me inside.

“We have to keep up the pretense of me being very important,” he said, once we were in my apartment. “It was helpful the last time we were at the sea farm, and we may need it again. I just hope Mhairi won’t hold it against me.”

I sat down at my table. I had a million questions, and I could only see the answers to some of them in Lucas’s head.

“Why are you here?” I asked, finally. I thought I knew the answer, but I wanted to hear Lucas say it.

Lucas sat down across from me. “Officially, I’m here to talk to Juniper and Admiral Tregereth about the upcoming Lottery. The candidates from the sea farm will be leaving for their pre-Lottery month at the Hive soon, and we needed to discuss which sea farm appointments have highest priority. We also discussed whether to allow older candidates to try the Lottery process, now that the sea farm’s process has changed.”

“And unofficially?”

“I’m here for you.” Lucas leaned in. “We haven’t re-tested you yet, but from what Juniper said, there’s no doubt. You’re fully in control of your telepathic sense now, aren’t you?”

“And that was what you were trying for all along, even though you never warned me.”

“We couldn’t tell you,” Lucas said. “The amount of pressure we’d have placed on you — and we didn’t even know if it could work.” 

He looked uncomfortable, and I reached out to touch his mind again. Yes, some levels of his mind were conflicted about what he had done. He knew the Hive needed more telepaths, and he hadn’t questioned the need to try. But at the same time, he understood that he’d radically changed my life in the process. He had seen Amber, who he loved dearly, struggle with these same issues. He wouldn’t have put someone else through it unless it was crucial to the Hive’s survival.

There was more there, but I couldn’t follow even a quarter of it, given the speed at which Lucas’s thoughts raced past.

“Please explain with words,” I said. “Amber might be used to reading your thoughts, but I’m not.”

Lucas grinned. “That’s fair.” He paused for a moment. “I think it started with Keith.”

I knew Keith was one of the other true telepaths, but I had never heard much about him. “Why Keith?”

“He’s not a true telepath,” Lucas said. “For years, the Hive has assumed that we had borderline telepaths and true telepaths, with a bright line between them. But Keith is sort of in-between. He’s a telepath, and he usually has conscious control of his abilities — but sometimes his abilities fail. Our true telepaths might get tired, but their abilities don’t fail unexpectedly the way Keith’s do.”

“Oh.” I thought about how terrified I had been in the aircraft, looking for Elodie, worrying about my abilities failing. I hoped this didn’t mean I’d face the same challenges as Keith.

“I started in Keith’s unit,” Lucas said. “Moving to Amber’s — seeing her training process — made me start to wonder. We’ve had other experiences, too.” His mind flashed the name Olivia, but I could tell whatever had happened with Olivia was a story that was too long to get into.

He scrubbed his hands through his hair. “We’ve been imprinting borderline telepaths for years. The imprints help them do the jobs we need them to do for the Hive, but I started wondering if those imprints could also be restricting their potential telepathic development. What if Keith was a strong borderline telepath who got lucky and performed exceptionally well during his Lottery? What if other borderline telepaths might be capable of similar growth, but their imprints were making them believe it wasn’t possible?”

“So you chose me,” I said. “Was I just the strongest borderline telepath in last year’s Lottery?”

“You were one of the stronger,” Lucas said, “but that wasn’t the reason we chose you. We wanted someone who had a strong drive to help people. We also needed someone who believed that skills could be strengthened through practice.” 

He smiled. “And you read amateur bookettes. That was one of the final factors in our decision. Your interest in amateur bookettes demonstrated that you had an openness to new ideas.”

I shook my head. Lucas must have read more than a few amateur bookettes himself, to come up with a plan like this one.

Lucas went on. “We thought about sending our candidate to Hive Futura, putting them through the full true telepath training process, but it would have been difficult to get approval to take a step that extreme for a completely untested theory, and we worried that it would place the candidate under too much pressure. Especially for something we didn’t even know was possible.”

He shrugged. “We were already discussing adding a borderline telepath at the sea farm, and assigning our unimprinted borderline telepath candidate here seemed like a much better idea than Hive Futura. At the sea farm, you’d be performing a job that needed to be done, be rewarded by seeing your gift helping people, and have reasons to use your telepathic abilities frequently. And it would keep you away from the true telepaths at the Hive. True telepaths must never meet, so it was important to keep you away from the others, just in case. We were careful not to give you the final tests and fully awaken your borderline telepathy until you were ready to leave the Hive.”

Which made Megan’s panic on the day I had left Amber’s unit make even more sense. “Why can’t true telepaths ever meet?”

“We don’t know,” Lucas said. “It’s not included in any of the Telepath Unit imprints, so we believe it’s important that the telepaths not know the answer to that.” 

He shrugged again. “You won’t need to worry about that. Your Unit staff will keep you away from all of the other telepaths.”

“My Unit?”

“Your Unit,” Lucas said. “I’ve already brought you your first potential member. Mhairi is Morton’s Deputy Strike Team Leader, but if you confirm her, she’ll be your Strike Team Leader in your new unit.”

“My Unit,” I said, still feeling stunned. I had known that my telepathic skills had developed, but I hadn’t thought they were anything like what it would take to make me the center of a telepath unit.

Lucas went on. “It’s undergoing refurbishment right now, which is why we didn’t come get you the moment Juniper reported that you’d been able to locate your sister and the other missing teens from an aircraft. Juniper has had her suspicions about the strength of your abilities for the past month or so, but it was finding the missing teens that confirmed it.”

“Since I started making progress with the exercises from the book,” I said, feeling dazed.

“The book?” Lucas frowned.

“In the library,” I said. “One of the things I did between Sea Farm Security cases was help Pearl, the sea farm librarian, sort books. I came across a book from the early days of the Hive, talking about trying to help people develop their telepathic gifts to protect the Hive. The author included exercises for telepaths.”

Lucas groaned. “And we worked so hard to keep from telling you anything too specific about how telepaths worked!”

“The exercises were helpful,” I said. “Mostly. The author didn’t seem to know about the barrier.”

Lucas looked thoughtful. “I’m not sure what you mean by barrier, but I can see we’re going to have to track down a copy of this book of yours, and discuss all the details of your telepathic development. Maybe we can make things easier for the next borderline telepath to try this.”

I thought for a moment. If I had been able to do this, perhaps other borderline telepaths could as well. It made me feel a little sad, thinking about my duties being taken over by a new borderline telepath candidate from the coming Lottery. But I was happy to think that Juniper would have a new person to help keep the people of the sea farm safe.

“We’ll give you more training once you get back to the Hive,” Lucas said. “We’ve got five other telepaths now, so your Unit won’t need to be operational until you’re fully prepared. We’re all aware that this is new territory. We’ve never done this before.”

He grinned. “We’d have to take things slowly anyway. We’ve never staffed a Telepath Unit outside of Lottery before, either! You’ll be running on a skeleton crew for the next couple months, until we can get your Unit’s numbers up this coming Lottery, and recruit new Telepath Unit staff to replace the vacancies left in the other Units by people transferring to yours.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “This is a lot to take in.”

Lucas’s face grew serious. “I know,” he said. “But your Hive needs you, Kate.”

I thought about it. From all the insights I’d had in Amber’s unit, during my training — from my glimpses into Lucas’s mind just now — I knew that the Hive desperately needed telepaths. The ones they had, and the ones they didn’t. And Lucas was right that I wanted to help people. 

When Buzz had told me I had the opportunity to make a choice about my future, I had thought that the sea farm would be the adventure. Coming to a new place, meeting new people, and learning a new way to do things. But the sea farm had only been the first step on a longer journey.

I knew I would miss the sea farm. I hadn’t expected to come to love it here, but I had. But I also knew the next part of my story was back at the Hive, learning to use my gifts to help others.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I’m ready.”


End file.
